A multi-year, paid program that takes people into the trades.
The Trade Academy is one of three paths into a CuraHaus Care Team. It is the program through which people entering the trades for the first time become licensed, certified, fully-trained members of the practice. It is paid from day one, structured over years, and taught by the experienced tradespeople already on the Care Teams.
The fastest way to ensure a Care Team works the CuraHaus way is to teach the work that way from the first day.
One
What the Academy is
A multi-year, paid, in-house training program that takes people entering the trades for the first time and turns them into licensed, certified, fully-prepared members of a Care Team.
The Trade Academy is the path CuraHaus offers to people who are entering the trades for the first time. It is for high school graduates choosing the trades over college, for community college students looking for a real apprenticeship, and for young people whose families have worked in the trades and who want to do the same on a structured path with real benefits and a real future.
The program is modeled on the most respected internal training programs in the multi-trade home services industry — the in-house academies that the best operators have built precisely because the open labor market cannot produce enough qualified tradespeople to meet demand. The shortage is structural and growing. Building a real academy is how a careful practice solves it.
What makes the Trade Academy different from a generic apprenticeship is that the people teaching it are the same Care Team leads who serve CuraHaus members every day, and the standard they teach is the Cornerstone Standard. Apprentices learn the technical skills of their trade, but they also learn — from day one — how to document a visit in the Chart, how to communicate with a member, how to work as part of a Care Team, and how to treat a home and the people in it with the kind of care that CuraHaus is built on. The technical training and the standard training happen together. By graduation, an Academy graduate has not been trained in a trade and then taught the CuraHaus way. They have been taught the CuraHaus way as their first way of working.
Two
How the program is structured
A multi-year arc that combines classroom education, field training under experienced Care Team leads, and paid work from the first day. Apprentices earn while they learn, and earn more as they progress.
The Academy is structured as a multi-year apprenticeship built around three layered components: classroom education (technical instruction and certification preparation, in partnership with vocational schools and community colleges in the region), field training (paid work on real properties under the supervision of experienced Care Team leads), and standards integration (learning the Cornerstone Standard, the Chart, the Care Plan workflow, and the practice's documentation discipline alongside the technical work).
Year one is foundational. Apprentices spend a significant portion of their time in classroom instruction, working through the technical fundamentals of their chosen trade. The field component is observation-heavy: apprentices accompany Care Teams on Rounds, learn to read a Chart, watch how findings are documented, and begin to take on simple tasks under close supervision. Compensation begins on day one and includes full benefits.
Year two shifts the balance toward the field. Apprentices take on increasingly complex tasks, begin to make their own entries in the Chart, and start to develop their specialty. The classroom component continues but narrows toward licensure preparation. Compensation increases at defined milestones tied to skills demonstrated and certifications earned.
Year three and beyond is when the apprentice becomes a productive member of a Care Team. They have earned the certifications their trade requires, they have demonstrated the standards the practice holds, and they have built relationships with the members whose properties they have helped care for during training. At graduation, they are not joining a new team — they are staying on the team they have been part of all along, now as a full member rather than an apprentice.
The Academy partners with regional vocational schools and community colleges to source candidates and to provide formal classroom curriculum. These partnerships also create pathways for students at those institutions to discover the trades as a serious career and to find an apprenticeship that pays them from the first day rather than asking them to take on debt to enter the field.
Three
Why this matters for members
An Academy-trained Care Team member is not a substitute for experience. They are a feature of the practice — someone whose first way of working is the CuraHaus way.
A reasonable member, reading about an in-house training program, might wonder whether the people CuraHaus trains are as good as experienced tradespeople hired from the open market. The honest answer is that they are different — and the difference is, in some specific ways, an advantage.
An experienced tradesperson hired from another company arrives with years of skill but also with years of habits — many good, some not. Some of those habits have to be unlearned to fit the way CuraHaus works. Documenting every finding in the Chart, communicating honestly with members about what was found, treating a home like a home rather than a job site, working as part of a continuous Care Team rather than rotating between properties — these are not the default habits of the trades industry. Experienced tradespeople who join CuraHaus through acquisition learn them quickly, and the best ones become the leads who teach them to others. But the learning is real, and it takes time.
An Academy graduate has none of those habits to unlearn. From the first day they ever picked up a tool on a CuraHaus property, they were taught that the Chart is non-negotiable, that communication is part of the work, that the standard is the standard. By the time they graduate, those things are not adjustments. They are the only way they have ever known to do the job. In a practice that depends on consistency across years and properties, that kind of deep alignment is its own form of expertise.
Every Care Team will always have experienced tradespeople on it. The Academy does not replace them — it supplements them, succeeds them, and over time becomes the practice's primary source of new tradespeople so that growth does not depend on hiring people away from other companies. That is the long arc the Academy is built for.
The Academy is the practice's commitment to growing its own people, in a field where that has been treated as someone else's responsibility for too long.
For decades, the trades have been treated as a labor market problem rather than a vocation worth investing in. The result is the shortage every home services company now faces: not enough licensed tradespeople, an aging workforce, and a generation of young people who were told that going into the trades meant settling for less. None of that is true, and none of it is inevitable.
CuraHaus is being built around the opposite assumption. The trades are work worth doing for a lifetime, and the people who do them are worth investing in from the first day. The Trade Academy is the most concrete form that investment takes. It is also the path the practice depends on for its own future — the Care Teams of ten and twenty years from now will be made up, in significant part, of people who came in through the Academy and never knew any other way to do the work.
For members, an Intake. For the trades, a future.
If you are a homeowner, Intake is the first step toward membership. If you are interested in joining the Trade Academy as an apprentice, the path begins on the Careers page.