UC San Diego and the Guam Contractors Association (GCA) are widening safety training on Guam, sending specialized instructors to an island where construction keeps climbing and mainland courses sit thousands of miles away. The university's announcement credits a $950,000 Susan Harwood Training Grant with supporting the expansion, though it does not break out a Guam-specific share of the award. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) awards Harwood grants for hazard-prevention training.
Construction Employment on Guam Has Climbed Since 2020
Guam's Department of Labor counted 12,470 construction jobs in September 2025, up from 7,860 in September 2020, according to its Economic Outlook for Fiscal Year 2027. The department expects construction to keep growing through fiscal years 2026 and 2027.
Military projects add to that load. Department of Defense (DOD) projects under construction in 2025 carried a combined cost of $3.1 billion, and $1.7 billion of that work was still unfinished. A year earlier, those numbers stood at $2.2 billion and $1.1 billion. Both track the value of work in progress, which differs from yearly spending.
Each of those new workers has to learn the hazards of the job, and contractors hiring at that pace draw on the same limited pool of experienced crews and instructors. Mainland builders have seen labor constraints spill into procurement and scheduling.
Training Moves to the Job Site
The new courses cover warehouse safety, confined spaces, traffic control, and excavation and trenching. Getting a worker into one of those classes on the mainland can mean airfare, hotel nights and several days off the job. The university says many smaller employers can't carry that expense.
On a recent trip, the instructors arrived with four classes scheduled and added a fifth at one company's facility, because the employer couldn't spare its whole staff at once. Training on site reaches crews whose shifts would otherwise keep them out. Employers still have to free up the hours and match each course to the hazards a crew faces.
UC San Diego has run a version of this before. In February 2019, a separate $284,000 Harwood grant funded three weeks of classes that reached 600 workers across Guam, Saipan, Tinian and Rota, covering protective equipment and storm recovery hazards such as electrical repairs and mold removal.
Local Trainers Could Reduce Reliance on Visiting Instructors
Alongside the visiting courses, the two organizations are preparing Guam professionals to become OSHA-authorized trainers. GCA has built a safety professional pathway around university coursework and added it to its apprenticeship program, similar to the skilled trades pipelines employers are building in other markets.
OSHA sets the requirements for that authorization through its Outreach Training Program. Candidates need industry safety experience, a course in the relevant standards and a trainer course, and they must take an update course every four years. Once authorized, they teach as independent providers rather than as OSHA employees.
The agency draws a firm line around what those classes accomplish. Outreach training does not meet the training requirements in OSHA standards, so employers still owe workers instruction on the specific hazards of their jobs, something inspectors check during site visits. Trainers based on the island could make it easier to pair general classes with ongoing instruction for supervisors, new hires and subcontractors.
What the announcement leaves out is outcome data. It gives no injury figures and no count of Guam professionals who have completed authorization, two numbers worth watching as the program matures.
