Building Pittsburgh’s next talent pipeline

Key points:

• • Pittsburgh’s workforce pressure spans tech, healthcare, and skilled trades, requiring durable, employer-aligned talent pipelines.
• • Universities are expanding experiential learning and AI-ready curricula to close skills gaps and improve retention.
• • Construction and healthcare face acute labor shortages, making collaboration across education and industry essential to regional competitiveness.

February 2026 — Pittsburgh’s key workforce sits at the intersection of technology, “eds and meds,” and a construction-and-restoration cycle that is putting real pressure on the talent pipeline.

Join us at the Invest: Pittsburgh 3rd Edition Leadership Summit! This premier event brings together hundreds of Pittsburgh’s business and regional leaders to discuss the challenges and opportunities for businesses and investors. Buy your ticket now!

In 2025, 71% of U.S. employers reported difficulty finding the skilled talent they need. That tension and the collaboration required to resolve it sits at the heart of one of the key conversations at the upcoming Invest: Pittsburgh leadership summit.

With leaders spanning the built environment, higher education, and healthcare, the opening panel discussion will reflect what is increasingly true in Southwestern Pennsylvania — that closing skills gaps is less about one-off recruitment pushes and more about building durable pipelines, co-designed with employers and reinforced through experiential learning.

Be part of the conversation at the Invest: Pittsburgh 3rd Edition Leadership Summit, taking place February 26, 2026 (8:00–11:00 a.m.) at the Rivers Club — an opportunity to connect with senior leaders across education, healthcare, construction, and beyond as Pittsburgh scales the next generation of talent and innovation.

Major jobs engine

Pittsburgh’s employer base has long been anchored by higher education and healthcare, with institutions such as the University of Pittsburgh and its affiliated medical center among the region’s largest non-governmental employers, alongside PNC Bank, Highmark Health, and Giant Eagle.

At the same time, the region’s robotics and AI cluster has matured into a major jobs engine. The Pittsburgh Robotics Network describes an ecosystem of 250-plus advanced technology companies supporting more than 7,300 jobs across sectors ranging from autonomous transportation to healthcare and manufacturing.

This creates both an opportunity and an imperative that curricula must move quickly enough to match real-world demand, while still building the “human skills” that remain differentiators as automation accelerates.

In an interview with Invest:, Christina Clark, president of La Roche University, framed the moment as an “AI-driven industrial revolution,” with institutions needing to ensure graduates leave campus with both technical fluency and the judgment to use it responsibly. 

“Employers now prioritize these skills over experience,” Clark said, adding that La Roche moved to ensure “every student graduated with these competencies.” Clark also pointed to the shrinking availability of traditional entry-level roles, emphasizing experiential pathways that translate classroom learning into workplace readiness.

Experiential learning

If skills gaps are the problem, work-engaged learning is increasingly the mechanism for solving them at scale. At La Roche, Clark highlighted the university’s SOLVE Center model, where community partners bring projects and students tackle applied work through courses and faculty-led engagement. La Roche cites National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) benchmarking that 96% of its courses include experiential learning, compared with 56% at peer Catholic institutions, 44% at Carnegie-class institutions, and 43% across NSSE institutions overall.

At Slippery Rock University, president Karen Riley described a similar emphasis on outcomes — and the operational discipline required to reach them. “Our strategic plan goal was to increase retention by 0.5% year over year for five years,” Riley told Invest:. “In our first two years, we have increased retention 4.8%, from 81.6% to 86.4%… and far exceeding the national average of 77%.” Workforce partnerships are central to that strategy, she noted, pointing to relationships that shape curriculum and provide hands-on training environments — including safety equipment support and curriculum input from corporate partners, and clinical training pathways with major health systems.

These models reflect a broader higher-education reality: demographic headwinds and intensifying competition are forcing institutions to differentiate through career outcomes and employer alignment, particularly as the “enrollment cliff” reshapes recruitment strategies nationwide.

The skilled-trades squeeze

Pittsburgh’s skills conversation isn’t only happening in labs and lecture halls. It is also happening on job sites, and in the workforce systems that feed them.

Guy Amatangelo, president of restoration firm Mariani & Richards Inc, described the past two years as “an explosion of activity,” with a level of volume he said he “had not witnessed in 20 years.” 

That surge is paired with a familiar constraint: talent. “In the past six to seven weeks alone, we have hired approximately 20 people,” Amatangelo said, adding that if more qualified candidates were available, the company would hire them. He also underscored the recruitment gap facing unions and contractors alike, calling it “an ongoing effort to engage younger generations in the trades and increase interest levels.”

A PublicSource analysis found the Pittsburgh region has lost nearly a quarter (23%) of its skilled trades workers ages 25–44 since 2012, intensifying competition for talent just as infrastructure, redevelopment, and industrial investment demands grow. And local workforce leaders have warned of a longer-run constraint: in 2025, Pittsburgh and Allegheny County leaders anticipated a shortfall of 80,000-plus workers over the next decade, reinforcing the need for training-to-employment pathways that convert potential into job-ready talent.

Designing for budgets, longevity

In architecture, the skills conversation often shows up as a business resilience question: how do firms remain stable through cycles while still building teams and mentoring the next generation?

Martin Kimmel, president of Kimmel Architecture, linked his firm’s growth to a long-term strategy built around diversification and mission-driven delivery — a model he said has helped the company avoid layoffs for decades. “Because of that model, we’ve never had a layoff in 30 years,” Kimmel said, noting that even as segments such as multifamily soften, balance and discipline create stability.

Kimmel also pointed to the firm’s operating philosophy — “Extraordinary Solutions for Ordinary Budgets” — as a differentiator that requires both technical competence and problem-solving creativity. In practice, that means designing waste out of the process so clients can apply budgets where value matters most.

Navigating complexity at scale

Healthcare is one of Pittsburgh’s defining sectors, and it is also one of the most complex talent environments — blending clinical skills, digital systems, customer experience, and behavioral health capacity.

Sally Schufreider, market leader and general manager of Cigna Healthcare, pointed to personalization and proactive support as central to improving navigation for members, describing a strategy built around a dedicated customer experience team and “an office of transformation.” Schufreider also highlighted the cost environment shaping healthcare employers’ priorities, saying the industry is facing the “highest healthcare cost increases in 15 years,” with employers feeling the pressure as healthcare remains a top expense category.

What collaboration looks like now

Across sectors, the most effective approaches connect training to tangible work — through practicums, clinicals, apprenticeships, and employer-led curriculum input. In Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania, organizations such as the regional workforce development boards are structuring programs that tie funding to outcomes and support learn-and-earn models. Meanwhile, state-level investments continue to prioritize apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeships in high-demand fields such as advanced manufacturing.

For employers, the question is increasingly less “Where can we find talent?” and more “How do we help build it?” And for educators, it is less “What should we teach?” and more “How do we teach in partnership with the labor market, without losing what makes graduates adaptable over the long term?”

As the region scales its robotics and AI ecosystem, reinvests in neighborhoods and legacy facilities, and continues to lead in healthcare and higher education, the workforce challenge becomes a competitive advantage for those who collaborate early, build pipelines intentionally, and treat skills development as a shared regional strategy.

Want more? Check out the Invest: Pittsburgh report!