October 14, 2026

The Electrician Shortage Is Real. Here's How We're Designing Around It.

The Electrician Shortage Is Real. Here’s How Leviton Is Designing Around It.

By Justin Berghoff, Vice President & General Manager, Residential Business at Leviton | Driving Electrification, Smart Home Innovation & Growth

“When I’m having conversations with builders and contractors, we eventually get around to the reality facing our industry. Skilled trades are navigating one of the most significant generational transitions the industry has ever faced. Experienced electricians who have spent decades mastering their craft are moving toward the next chapter of their lives, and the pipeline of new talent coming up behind them isn’t keeping pace with demands.

The numbers tell a clear story. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that despite electrician employment growing 9% from 2024 to 2034, triple the average growth rate across all occupations, there will still be 81,000 job openings for electricians projected annually over that same period. A significant share of those openings exists not because the industry is expanding but simply to replace workers exiting the labor force. Demand is rising, and the workforce isn’t growing fast enough to meet it.

For residential construction, this isn’t an abstract workforce statistic. It shows up in bid costs, stretched timelines, and competitive pressures that builders and contractors feel on every job.

When Every Bid Becomes a Bet

Builders and contractors aren’t losing sleep because labor costs money. They’re losing sleep because they can’t predict those costs as precisely anymore. A tight labor market turns every bid into a bet. How do you price a job when you don’t know if you can staff it? How do you set a timeline when your most experienced hands are already stretched across several other job sites?

There’s no easy relief valve. Buyers are already rate-sensitive, and passing costs through isn’t an option. The result is a business managing more complexity with less margin for error on every side.

This is the reality we design for.

Product Innovations That Respect the Value of a Skilled Professional’s Time

One of the clearest examples of how Leviton has responded to the labor shortage is Lever Edge, our innovative lever-action wiring technology designed to simplify installation and cut device wiring time by up to 3.8x per device. Our assembly-ready electrical components, like residential grade switches and outlets, are ideal for modular and manufactured housing construction, where electrical work increasingly happens away from the traditional job site and outside conventional workflows.

The Leviton Load Center brings that same efficiency-first thinking to panel installation. Thanks to its wiring infrastructure, it can be up to 25% faster to install than a traditional panel, and when it comes time for upgrades or service work down the road, those can be completed more easily and quickly as well.

How homes are being built is changing, and our products need to reflect the world as it actually is.

A single product that saves time on one task is necessary, but not always sufficient. The more compelling conversation is about what happens when you design an entire home’s electrical system to work together from the very start.

From Panel to Plug: Efficiency as a System

The most efficient home isn’t the one with the best individual products. It’s the one designed as a system.

Today’s homes are no longer a collection of isolated electrical devices. They are complex ecosystems that include EV charging, smart controls, Wi-Fi connected devices, energy management technologies, and high-efficiency appliances. As those technologies continue to expand, the value of a coordinated, whole-home electrical strategy becomes increasingly important.

That’s why more builders and contractors are looking beyond individual product specifications and thinking about how the entire home works together. When the load center, lighting controls, protection devices, EV charging, and other core electrical components are designed as part of the same ecosystem, planning becomes simpler, installation becomes more streamlined, and long-term support becomes easier.

This is the philosophy behind Whole Home Leviton: a complete electrical solution engineered from panel to plug.

Investing in the Next Generation of the Trade

Product design is only part of the answer to this workforce challenge. The other part, which I feel just as strongly about, is investing in the people like entering this industry and helping them build careers that are sustainable and genuinely rewarding.

At Leviton, that means going well beyond product training. Our NextGen program is designed specifically to meet the next wave of electrical professionals where they are, not just with hands-on product knowledge but with education on code changes, business practices, and the marketing fundamentals they’ll need to run and grow their own companies. This is transformational for younger tradespeople who are technically skilled but don’t necessarily have a roadmap for the business side of their career. Additionally, through our ongoing collaboration with the International Association of Electrical Inspectors (IAEI), we’re reinforcing code literacy across the profession, getting critical real-world feedback from inspectors who’ve seen it all, and ensuring that our products reflect the realities of the field.

We’re also focused on trade schools. The electricians in training today will be the ones installing smart load centers, EV chargers, and AI-enabled protection devices in every home built over the next two decades. We want them learning from the best materials available and gaining exposure to the newest innovations in the trade.

A great example of that partnership in action is our work with the Electrical Training Center (ETC) on Long Island. When they held a code training seminar earlier this year, they invited Leviton to participate, and we were able to connect with nearly 400 contractors in a single day. We also hold student trainings at our Melville headquarters at least annually, and this August our team is heading to ETC’s locations in Copiague and Bellport to train the next class of electricians on the Leviton Load Center.

Sometimes the proof shows up in ways that are hard to ignore. Students at Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology recently built a Parade of Homes entry from the ground up — featuring Decora Smart controls, a smart Load Center, EV charging stations, and whole-home networking. Competing directly alongside professional builders, they won Best of Show and swept their division. That’s what it looks like when students in the trades get access to the best tools and the newest technology.

If we’re serious about closing the workforce gap, we have to be serious about where it starts, and that’s in the classroom with Leviton solutions in their hands.

This Isn’t a 2-Year Problem. And the Industry Knows It.

The generational transition underway in the skilled trades is real. But I believe our industry has more tools available than we’ve fully deployed in how we design products, how we build and spec homes, how we support the professionals doing the work, and in how we invest in the professionals just entering the skilled labor field.

At Leviton, our answer to this challenge isn’t a single labor-saving device. It’s a complete system, from the panel to the plug, backed by 120 years of understanding how every component in a home’s electrical system connects to everything else. That institutional knowledge, combined with a genuine commitment to support the people who build, install, and live in these homes, is how we’re working toward a real answer.

The electrician shortage is real, and so is our commitment to designing for true success, from the product to the profession.

I’d like to hear from people in the field: how are compressed timelines and rising labor costs reshaping the way you spec and bid jobs? And where do you see the biggest opportunity to design smarter? In the product, the process, or the pipeline of people? Drop a comment below.”

Source (Original Post from LinkedIn).

Leviton Accelerates AI and Smart Building Network Infrastructure with New $100 Million Global Capital Investment

Leviton, a global leader in electrical, lighting and networking systems, announced a $100 million global capital investment in its Network Solutions business on September 24, 2026. This initiative builds on the success of their previous five‑year $80M capital program completed in 2025. In response to record demand for Network Solutions products, this five-year investment reinforces the company’s long‑term commitment to global manufacturing for scale, speed, agility and assurance as demand for AI‑driven and smart building network infrastructure accelerates worldwide.

The Electrician Shortage Is Real. Here’s How Leviton Is Designing Around It.