Eighty hours to go from never having touched a machine to running a skid steer and a mini excavator on a live site — and knowing enough about safety, soil and site plans that a foreman trusts you near a trench.
Labor Day, Monday September 7, is a holiday — class begins Tuesday the 8th. Nine full days, all 80 hours delivered on site.
Off-site training days are part of this course. Some of your hands-on hours happen away from the classroom on working equipment. Once you're at the church each morning, we transport you there and back — you won't need to follow the group in your own vehicle.
Lunch is provided, and it's a working lunch. Served buffet style, eaten with the class while instruction continues, so the hour counts toward your 80. We can't accommodate special dietary needs — pack your own if you need to.
Controls, stability and load charts, attachment changes, loading a truck, grading a pad, and working safely around people on the ground.
Trenching to grade, slope work, backfill, precision digging around utilities, and moving the machine on and off a trailer.
Soil classification, protective systems, competent-person duties, utility locates, and the rules that decide when a trench is a coffin.
Site plans, grade stakes, staging and traffic flow, and where your machine belongs in the sequence of the job.
Each module unlocks when you pass the one before it. Every module ends with a project you build and submit and a quiz you have to clear — no skipping ahead, no finishing without doing the work.
OSHA construction standards (29 CFR 1926), the Fatal Four, PPE, excavation and trenching safety, protective systems, 811 utility locates, jobsite roles and organization.
Anatomy, hydraulics and control patterns, pre-operation inspection, trenching to depth and grade, spoil and backfill, slopes and confined spaces, digging near utilities, trailering. Earns the Academy Mini-Excavator Certificate.
Controls and counter-rotation, rated operating capacity, quick-attach systems, buckets and forks, material handling, back-dragging and grading, trailer transport. Earns the Academy Skid Steer Certificate.
Measuring and layout to a quarter inch, hand and power tool safety, soils and aggregates, compaction, concrete basics, drainage materials and fasteners.
Site plans, grading plans and utility drawings; grade stakes and field markings; spotter signals, radio protocols, and reporting like a professional.
A construction-focused resume, mock interviews, industry expectations, union and apprenticeship pathways, written final and individual equipment evaluations.
The whole track runs inside a fictional contractor called Ozark Compact & Site Co. Your host is Tony Ramirez. Your mentor is Foreman Dana Cole, twenty-two years in. Marcus is the guy on the crew a few weeks ahead of you. Every assignment is a job Dana hands you, not a worksheet.
You start as a Greenhorn and work up to Site Boss. Every lesson earns XP, every module earns a badge, and no video runs longer than fourteen minutes because nobody learns anything from a fifty-minute lecture.
Every single lesson ends with something you actually do — an inspection you write up, a load you calculate, a plan you mark up and submit. That's how forty of the eighty hours get spent.
Five minutes to apply. No cost, no obligation, no catch — the program is grant funded start to finish.
