With the highest turnover rate of any major industry, construction companies face a unique and growing cybersecurity risk every time an employee, contractor, or subcontractor joins or leaves a project. Most firms have no formal process to manage the IT side of those transitions.
The Industry With the Revolving Door
Construction has always been defined by a state of constant movement. Crews mobilize and demobilize. Subcontractors rotate between projects. Seasonal workers arrive in spring and move on to another project by winter. Project managers transition between firms. It’s just the nature of the business.
But that constant churn carries a cost that many construction companies have never measured.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Autodesk's 2025 industry analysis, construction carries a 21.4% industry-wide turnover rate, making it one of the highest of any sector in the U.S. economy. Some estimates place the figure far higher.
A 2025 workforce study found that skilled trades turnover reaches 73.1% annually, with general laborers at 89.3%. By comparison, the national average across all industries sits between 12% and 15%.
Every one of those departures represents a user account, a VPN credential, access to project management software, and potentially dozens of cloud applications. And every transition, if handled improperly, represents a security gap that most construction companies are completely unaware of.
What Happens When Onboarding Is an Afterthought
In many construction firms, onboarding a new employee or subcontractor is a handshake and a hard hat. The IT side of the equation can often feel like an afterthought, lacking attention it deserves.
A new project engineer starts on Monday. Their laptop arrives on Wednesday. Their email account is created Thursday. Access to the project management platform comes the following week, if someone even remembers to request it.
In the meantime, a colleague might share their own login so the new hire can access what they need.
This isn’t an exaggeration for the sake of the narrative. It’s actually a pretty common practice at firms that lack a formalized IT onboarding process, and the consequences can be significant.
When new employees can’t access the systems they need on day one, workarounds emerge. Shared logins, passwords written on sticky notes, and generic "office" accounts become part of the culture. Each one eliminates any ability to track who accessed what and when.
A Gartner survey found that 47% of digital workers struggle to find the information they need to do their jobs effectively early on. In construction, where project timelines are tight and delays carry financial penalties, a new hire who spends their first week waiting for IT access is a new hire who is already far behind where they need to be.
When IT onboarding is informal, cybersecurity training rarely makes the list. New employees rarely learn how to identify phishing emails, handle sensitive project data, or follow proper access protocols. Given that phishing attacks on construction companies increased 83% between 2023 and 2024, this is a potential security risk that needs to be eliminated.
What Happens When Offboarding Does Not Happen At All
If onboarding is an afterthought in construction, offboarding is often just as nonexistent, and the data on this problem is alarming:
- 38% of employees have accessed a prior employer's accounts after leaving the company, according to 1Password's 2025 Annual Report.
- Over half of employees admit to taking information from a former employer, with 40% intending to use it in their new role.
- Verizon's 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report found that over 22% of all data breaches involve insiders, with access mismanagement as a recurring root cause.
- The Ponemon Institute estimates the average cost of an insider threat incident at $17.4 million per occurrence.
In construction specifically, the risks are amplified by the nature of the data at stake. Bid proposals, financial records, banking credentials, payroll information, proprietary designs, and client contracts all sit in systems that a departed employee may still be able to access weeks or months after their last day on the job.
In September of 2025 FinWise Bank disclosed that a former employee accessed sensitive customer information for nearly 700,000 individuals after their employment ended. The breach was not a sophisticated hack. It was simply an account that was never disabled. The same failure pattern plays out across industries, and construction, with its high volume of personnel transitions and limited IT oversight, is especially vulnerable.
Why Construction Is a Prime Target
The construction industry's cybersecurity challenges extend beyond turnover, but turnover makes every other vulnerability worse.
Cyberattacks on construction companies doubled from 2023 to 2024. Ransomware attacks against the industry rose 41% over the same period. Construction firms are attractive targets for several reasons that compound the onboarding and offboarding problem:
A single construction project may involve dozens of firms: architects, engineers, general contractors, subcontractors, suppliers, and owner representatives. Each one represents an access point. Each one has employees who come and go. Managing credentials across this extended network is exponentially more complex than in a single-entity business.
Construction companies handle sensitive financial data, project bids, and proprietary designs, yet many operate with minimal cybersecurity infrastructure. Smaller firms may have no dedicated IT staff at all.
When a culture prioritizes speed over security security protocols are often treated as obstacles rather than safeguards. Getting a new hire productive today takes precedence over getting them properly credentialed.
The Real Cost of Getting This Wrong
The global average cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million in 2024, the highest ever recorded. For construction firms handling government contracts, the regulatory and legal exposure can be even greater.
When employees leave and their accounts remain active, the company continues paying for licenses no one is using. 1Password's research estimates that even a mid-sized company with 15% annual turnover can waste thousands of dollars per year on orphaned SaaS licenses alone. For construction firms with turnover rates three to five times that figure, the waste scales accordingly.
A ransomware attack triggered by a compromised former employee account can halt project operations for days or weeks. A $9 million ransomware attack on a Canadian contractor and another on a Chicago-based firm that affected more than 1,000 people are recent, documented examples.
When project managers lose access to drawings, schedules, or financial systems due to a cyber incident, the downstream impact on project timelines can trigger contractual penalties that dwarf the cost of the breach itself.
What ConnectingPoint Recommends
At ConnectingPoint, we work with construction companies across Colorado to build IT lifecycle management programs that match the pace and complexity of the industry. Here is our recommended approach:
Onboarding Done Right
- Pre-arrival provisioning. User accounts, email, VPN access, and application credentials are created and tested before the employee's first day, not after.
- Role-based access controls. Permissions are assigned based on job function and project assignment, following the principle of least privilege. A field superintendent does not need access to the accounting system, and a bookkeeper does not need access to project design files.
- Device configuration and security baseline. Company-issued devices are pre-configured with endpoint protection, encryption, and management software before they leave IT.
- Cybersecurity training as a condition of access. No training, no login. Every new employee and subcontractor completes a baseline security awareness module covering phishing, password hygiene, and data handling before receiving system credentials.
Offboarding Done Right
- Same-day access revocation. All accounts, VPN credentials, cloud application access, email, and building access are disabled on or before the employee's last day. No exceptions.
- Device recovery and data wipe. Company-owned devices are collected, and company data on personal devices is remotely wiped per policy.
- License reclamation. Software licenses tied to departing employees are recovered and reassigned or terminated to eliminate waste.
- Quarterly orphaned account audits. IT conducts regular reviews to identify and disable any accounts that slipped through the offboarding process, including contractor and vendor accounts.
Every Departure Left Unmanaged Is a Door You Leave Unlocked
In an industry where cyberattacks doubled in a single year and turnover runs at five times the national average, the companies that formalize these processes will be the ones that avoid becoming the next headline.
Ready to close the gaps? Contact us to find out where your onboarding and offboarding processes stand, and what it will take to secure them.
Call us: 970.405.3248
Email: info@CPcolorado.com
Visit: www.CPcolorado.com
Network Discovery Form: https://www.cpcolorado.com/contact-us
ConnectingPoint is a Colorado-based managed IT services provider specializing in cybersecurity, cloud solutions, and infrastructure for construction, government, education, and business organizations.
