The Story of Skillit: Building the Future of Construction Labor

Sometimes, the most transformative companies emerge from the intersection of seemingly contradictory experiences. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Fraser Patterson shared how his unique background as both an academic and a carpenter led to the creation of Skillit, a company reimagining how the construction industry hires skilled workers.

A Tale of Two Influences

Fraser’s journey began with an unusual childhood dynamic. “I kind of grew up with a father trying to pull me into construction and a kind of grandfather pushing me into academia,” he recalls. Instead of choosing one path, he embraced both, spending years “as both a carpenter and also a GC and also a math researcher and tutor.”

This dual perspective would later prove invaluable. While running a tech-enabled general contracting company in New York, Fraser encountered a problem that would eventually lead to Skillit’s creation. “I came face to face with our nation’s skilled labor crisis,” he explains. The existing tools for hiring skilled workers were woefully inadequate – there was no efficient way to source workers, assess their skills, or connect with them effectively.

The Birth of a New Approach

The breakthrough came from Fraser’s experience conducting interviews with carpenters. “As a former carpenter myself, I learned to ask really quick questions that were like, using knowledge as a leading indicator of skill,” he shares. Simple questions about construction basics, like the true dimensions of a two-by-four, proved remarkably effective at assessing real-world experience.

This insight led to Skillit’s founding in 2021. The company’s innovation wasn’t just in digitizing hiring – it was in understanding how to evaluate practical skills through knowledge-based assessments. “To digitize that was kind of the birth of Skillit, building out these kind of digital craft assessments that could assess a worker’s skill using knowledge as a leading indicator,” Fraser explains.

Building the Platform

Rather than trying to boil the ocean, Skillit took a focused approach to growth. The platform started in specific regions with select trades, creating what Fraser calls “extremely data rich, 360-degree profiles” of workers. This was a stark contrast to existing solutions, which often amounted to little more than “a kind of online business card.”

The strategy paid off. The platform saw 540% year-over-year customer growth, with half of those customers won in Q4 alone. Worker adoption exploded with 1000% year-over-year growth, and the platform accumulated over 2.1 million proprietary data points about skills, compensation, and experience.

A Vision for the Future

But Skillit’s ambitions extend far beyond just fixing hiring. “The big vision here is, can we use that proprietary data and that digital infrastructure to help train and upskill the talent network, if you will, to become increasingly valuable to employers?” Fraser asks.

This vision comes at a crucial time. With the need to build millions of housing units, upgrade infrastructure, and tackle climate change through sustainable construction, skilled labor has never been more important. Fraser believes Skillit can play a transformative role: “I think we can make skilled labor one of the greatest assets on earth… and I think we can ultimately help the world achieve its housing, its infrastructure, its clean energy goals.”

In a world increasingly anxious about AI replacing knowledge workers, Fraser sees construction skills becoming even more valuable. “These jobs cannot be, by definition, automated anytime soon… They’re operating in unregularized environments.” This reality, combined with massive government infrastructure investments and the pressing need for sustainable construction, positions Skillit at the intersection of multiple powerful trends.

From a contractor’s frustration to a vision of transforming skilled labor itself, Skillit’s story demonstrates how deep industry understanding combined with technological innovation can create entirely new categories. As Fraser puts it, they’re “in a category of one” – and they’re just getting started.