Dan Penski, Jr., Director of Training & Apprenticeship at the Finishing Trades Institute of DC 14, had an interesting path to the trades. His family has been in the glazing trade for generations — his grandfather was one of the first hires at a unionized glass shop in Buffalo, New York, and nearly everyone in his extended family followed in his footsteps. But Dan took a different path, earning a master’s degree in education and teaching overseas before landing a curriculum-development role with the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades. That work eventually brought him to Chicago in 2019 to lead training for painters, industrial coaters, and drywall finishers.
Under Dan’s leadership, the Institute recently achieved full third-party accreditation—a rare distinction among training centers nationwide. He’s also been working to change how apprentices are admitted, so that a letter of intent from a well-connected contractor is not the only way to secure entry into the training program.
Q: How did you get into the trades, and what do you enjoy about this work?
“My background’s a little bit more unique than probably other directors of training you might meet. My background is purely in education. My entire family was a family of glaziers, on both sides of the aisle. My grandfather was the fourth guy hired in the first unionized glass shop in Buffalo, New York. But I decided to go to college instead. I was the first in my family to go that route, and I made it all the way through for my master’s. This fall, I’m going for my Ph.D at the same university we recently achieved accreditation with.
“I became a school teacher, taught in Poland for three years, and returned to finish my master’s. As I was finishing up, my dad mentioned there was an opportunity to work in the curriculum department at the International Union in Washington, D.C. I went down, had a couple of interviews, and started with the International — which nobody usually does; you work locally first. I was there for about seven years, developing the curriculum that every apprentice uses nationwide. Then this director position opened, and I got the opportunity to move to Chicago.”
Q: How was the Institute structured before you joined, and what made you want to change it?
“There was a weekend early on where I sat down and said there is no reason why I shouldn’t be able to go day one to day 120 and have a lesson planned for every single day. We built lesson plans, a curriculum matrix, syllabi, and structured semesters. This was a necessary evolution in staying academically relevant.
“One of the admins at the time asked me, ‘Do you want this to be run like a business, or like a shop?’ And I said, ‘Neither. We should run it like a school.’ She seemed puzzled at first. But that’s exactly what we’ve become. Just this past January, we finally reached full accreditation with a third party. We’re no longer just attached to the Department of Labor; we’re also attached to the Department of Education. We issue 33 college credits to our commercial painter graduates, which can transfer up to 90 credits toward a bachelor’s degree. There are maybe three or four training centers in the IUPAT with this level of accreditation, and I didn’t want to be number eight. I wanted to be number five.”
Q: Tell me about the Finishing Trades Institute and DC 14. What do you teach?
“You’ve got three trades here: commercial painting — that’s your schools, office buildings, high rises. Industrial painting, which is anything steel-structured, such as bridges, tanks, nuclear plants, and refineries. And drywall finishers, the tapers. Most people come in picking commercial painting because of the scope of work. It’s a 120-week program, and you go from orientation through surface prep, brush-and-roll, spray, wallcovering, decorative finishing, and wood finishing, with cross-training in industrial coatings and drywall finishing, too.
“Painting and any kind of finishing work is 80 to 90 percent setup and prep. When people get a tour here, and we start talking about swing stages, scaffolding, and safety, they leave saying, ‘Whoa, I had no idea.’ We’re just not on people’s radar.”
Q: How do apprentices get accepted into the program, and how are you trying to change that?
“A lot of who gets in has historically been driven by contractors — ‘Hey, I got a kid, send him down,’ kind of like my own family’s story, honestly. There’s some nepotism in that, and I’m trying to break it.
“Here’s what bothers me: I get 2,000-plus applicants a year. I only take in about 40 to 50 new apprentices. You walk in here as an applicant with no connections — your dad wasn’t a painter, you don’t know anybody — you get handed a list of 200 contractors and told to go get yourself hired. You’re not on the active list. Your information sits in a file cabinet. Meanwhile, an applicant with family connections has a much stronger chance. It’s a broken system when 2,000 people apply, and 40 get in — recruitment is not an issue; market share and retention will always be the biggest challenges we face.
“So I’ve spent about two years pitching this to contractors and staff. And we’re moving to a model that caps the number of applicants during a specific enrollment period, so every applicant receives an interview and is ranked on real criteria: experience, pre-apprenticeship training, non-union work, military service, and family background. Then I can go to contractors with an actual list of vetted, motivated candidates instead of just the unemployment list. It took getting everyone — the Department of Labor, my JATC board, union officials, and contractors — to buy into updating standards that hadn’t changed in 150 years. It may be the most impactful change happening here, even bigger than accreditation.”
