77% of contractors with an open estimator position cannot fill it, and the average respondent is 59.

Two reports, saying one thing. AGC and NCCER surveyed 1,342 member firms for the 2025 Workforce Survey, and of the firms with an open estimator position, 77 percent reported difficulty filling it. Electrical Contractor magazine's 2026 Profile of the Electrical Contractor found its respondents averaging 59 years old, with only 4 percent aged 18 to 34.

I am one of the 4 percent, and from where I sit the second number is the harder one. A vacancy you can advertise. What you cannot advertise for is what the person leaving already knows.

The knowledge that makes an estimator fast is not in a manual and not in any software. It is knowing that this engineer always draws a Type A1 as a circle with a slash. It is knowing that their exit signs come drawn twelve different ways across one set, and that the schedule on E-001 lists forty types of which six never appear on a sheet. Fifteen years of that lives in one head, gets used on bid day without anyone naming it out loud, and walks out the door at retirement. Then the next person starts again from the legend.

I learned takeoff the way everyone learns it, by being shown and by getting it wrong. That works, slowly, and it does not scale to a 59-year-old average.

What LumenTakeoff does about it

LumenTakeoff writes every confirmed name into the firm's library, tied to the symbol geometry and to the engineer the set came from. Confirming a name on one family applies it to every member signature of that family and stores it, so the decision gets made once rather than once per job.

The next set from that engineer then arrives partly pre-named. Names are pre-filled only from evidence, which means the firm's library from previous jobs, or colour and hexagon tags on the drawing itself, and never a guess about what the shape resembles. The header states where things stand in plain numbers: sheets counted, symbol families, named, still need review, and how many the library pre-named from past jobs. Every pre-filled name arrives as evidence for whoever is at the desk, with Confirm, type a name, and Not a fixture on each card.

For the estimator who is new, the naming queue does some of the teaching that used to happen over a shoulder. One unnamed family at a time, most frequent first, with a large ringed crop of a real instance on the real sheet. Type the code and the set's own fixture schedule completes it, the schedule description fills in beside it, and the names the firm confirmed on past jobs complete as well. The sources are shown separately, so a schedule row is never confused with a legend entry or with a prior confirmation by a colleague.

None of that replaces the senior estimator. It writes down what they already decided, in a form the next person can see, question and override. The scarce thing in a preconstruction department is experienced judgment, and it should not have to be spent twice on the same circle.

The machine counts. You decide.