"What a difference a year makes.” That just might be the biggest understatement of all time when trying to compare 2019 to 2020. After everything that’s transpired in 2020, it’s almost incomprehensible to me that just one year ago today I was sitting in this very spot in my home office writing this column on how long the longest-running economic expansion in history could possibly continue. The words I wrote that day seem almost inconsequential now and so far away: “On July 1, 2019, the current economic expansion of 121 months, which began roughly a decade ago after the end of the Great Recession, became the longest running expansion period in U.S. history, beating the previous 120-month record that started in March 1991 and ended in March 2001 when the dotcom bubble burst.” Everyone suspected that the good times were about to end, as all indications in our construction forecast pointed toward a slowdown of some sort in 2020. However, no one could have predicted the extent to which a pandemic would swoop in and shatter life as we knew it.

That proved especially true for the construction industry in March, when stay-at-home orders and lockdowns at the onset of the pandemic brought many construction projects to a screeching halt. Construction employment declined by 975,000 jobs in April, according to the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) at the time. “Today’s jobs report, our new survey results, and Procore’s data make it clear that the construction industry is not immune to the economic damage being inflicted on our country by the pandemic,” said Ken Simonson, the association’s chief economist. “Without new federal help, it is hard to see a scenario where the construction industry will be able to recover any time soon.” In that press release, the economist went on to explain that the loss of close to a million construction jobs from March to April constituted nearly 13% of the industry’s employment and was, by far, the “worst one-month decline ever.” Since that time, things have improved. For example, according to AGC, construction employment increased by 27,000 jobs in November (the most recent data available at the time of this writing), as “continuing robust gains in residential categories masked more sluggish increases in nonresidential jobs.” Association officials caution, however, that “pandemic-induced project cancellations and looming tax bills for firms that used Paycheck Protection Program loans to save jobs threaten to undermine future job growth in the sector.”

After everything we’ve endured as an industry and as a people this year, I think one thing we can all agree on is we won’t be sorry to see 2020 in the rearview mirror. Looking forward to 2021 with hope is one New Year’s resolution we can all get behind. That’s exactly what Jim Lucy, Editor-in-Chief of Electrical Wholesaling magazine, examines in this month’s construction forecast. Although he admits it was always going to be tricky to forecast the 2021 construction market — even before the pandemic hit — Lucy outlines the key factors industry experts and construction economists believe will shape the market going forward. “Despite the challenges confronting the office, multi-family, and retail markets, once a vaccine is widely distributed, the construction market will look a whole lot better than it did in spring 2020,” he writes. “The single-family housing, data center, warehouse, and utility-scale renewables segment of the market look particularly promising for electrical professionals.”

Although the forecast identifies certain markets that will inevitably take a big hit next year, the good news I get out of this piece is it might be a long tunnel ahead, but there is still light at the end of it.