Author Archives: Paul Wilkinson

About Paul Wilkinson

A construction PR and marketing specialist since 1987, an advocate of the application of social media in architecture, engineering and construction, and an authority on SaaS-based construction collaboration technologies. Speaker, writer, prolific blogger and tweeter, and PR manager for two Ethos-managed projects: SkillsPlanner and BuildForce.

House-building skills gap review launched

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RICS and APPG

SkillsPlanner’s partners and collaborators include a number of major infrastructure providers (Tideway, Crossrail, HS2 and Transport for London, for example), but that doesn’t mean we are ignoring the needs of other construction sectors, such as house-building. So we are particularly interested in the work of the National Housing Taskforce, convened by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS – another SkillsPlanner collaborator) and the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Housing & Planning.

The Taskforce has identified 12 workstreams with one particularly focused on construction skills, materials and technology:

We cannot achieve either the desired quality of quantity of new housing without addressing the skills gap that currently exists across the construction sector. Furthermore, there are unprecedented opportunities for improving productivity and driving down costs through the use of new construction techniques, such as off-site manufacture (OSM).

This work-stream is charged with addressing the main issues in the construction labour market, including availability, productivity and diversity. It will develop ideas for action for both government and industry, aimed at ensuring we have the capacity to deliver the homes we need.

Construction will need to findEach work-stream is being led by a relevant organisation that will submit recommendations to the Taskforce by the end of the year, and the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB, author of a 2015 report on the ageing workforce), has issued a call for evidence (to be submitted by 9 September 2016). CIOB policy manager David Hawkes said:

“At its most basic level, what this workstream boils down to is capacity. Studies have shown the housing sector needs 120,000 new employees just to meet the required annual level of homes the UK needs. At the same time, house builders say they cannot build more than 150,000 homes per year via conventional means.

“What this suggests to us is that something needs to fundamentally change if we are to properly address the housing crisis. We need more people working more productively and we have to work out how best to utilise and implement new technologies, materials and processes.”

Post-16 Skills PlanMr Hawkes said that the CIOB will analyse the responses it receives and then host ‘inquiry-style discussions’ before submitting its recommendations to the National Housing Taskforce by the end of the year.  The final National Housing Taskforce report, incorporating recommendations from all 12 workstreams, is expected to be released by spring 2017.

We hope this initiative will helpfully coincide with the publication of the Farmer Review. When the UK government launched its Post-16 Skills Plan last month (post), it committed to taking action in response to the review commissioned from the Construction Leadership Council and Mark Farmer of the functioning of the labour market, including skills provision, in the construction sector.

Housing is also, of course, a particularly acute issue for London and the south-east – the target area for the initial SkillsPlanner project.

Update (24 August 2016) – New London Architecture is holding a free breakfast debate, “Are we facing a construction skills crisis in housing?” on Friday 30 September 2016. More details here.

New: SkillsPlanner Intelligence Briefing 2

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To help keep SkillsPlanner stakeholders updated on key developments relating to construction skills in both industry and government, Plymouth University’s SERIO applied research unit is producing a series of intelligence briefings. The first was published in February (post); the second (PDF) has just been finalised and is now available in our media section.

Written in clear, non-academic English, these briefings are and intended to inform and engage our audiences with the ongoing R&D project. The latest looks at four main topics (some also discussed on the SkillsPlanner blog):

  • Apprenticeship Levy: In April 2016 the government released some additional detail concerning the specifics of the Apprenticeship Levy. This includes a deadline for spending funds raised through the levy (18 months) and the ability of ‘connected companies’ to pool their funds. However a number of details are yet to be released including: precise rules around how and with whom employers can pool funds; and how non-levy paying businesses, which make up the vast majority of construction employers will be funded to deliver Apprenticeships. Based on these emerging details, it is thought that the Apprenticeship fund could be a catalyst for increased levels of collaboration and partnership working between connected companies.
  • Post-16 Skills PlanFurther Education Provision: The London (Central) Area Based Review commenced in January 2016. The Review will examine the Further Education (FE) sector in the area and consider options for rationalising the curriculum and developing greater specialisation, as well as the prospects for any mergers, closures or collaboration. Similarly to the Apprenticeship Levy, the Review could encourage further partnership working and interact with other developments (such as the Sainsbury Review – post) to help simplify the technical and professional training market.
  • Transport Infrastructure Skills Strategy: The new Transport Infrastructure Skills Strategy (published January 2016) sets an ambition for at least 20% of new entrants to engineering and technical apprenticeships in the transport sector to be women by 2020. More widely, a new Strategic Transport Apprenticeship Taskforce will be set up to address skills challenges within the sector.
  • Government Construction Strategy: The Government Construction Strategy 2016-20 (see also this post) sets out how the government plans to develop its capability as an ‘exemplary’ construction client. One of the Strategy’s key aims is to develop collaborative procurement techniques to build skills capacity, including the delivery of 20,000 apprenticeships by 2020.

The reshuffle dust settles …

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GCS 2016-20

As the UK political establishment settles down after the EU Referendum (post) and the resulting spate of resignations and changes of office, the UK construction sector is now beginning to identify the new figures who will be leading key initiatives on areas such as housebuilding and planning, construction strategy, and skills.

Prime Minister Theresa May’s Cabinet reshuffle saw a plethora of new appointments, and as the various Cabinet ministers have begun to settle into their portfolios and some tasks have been moved between ministries, various junior minister posts have also been finalised.

Succeeding Nick Boles, Harlow MP Robert Halfon is the new apprentices and skills minister, appointed by education secretary Justine Greening – the skills brief having been moved from the former Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS, now the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, BEIS). Halfon appears well-suited to his new brief. He employed the first parliamentary apprentice, and says he has “led from the front in championing apprenticeships.” We assume he will be taking responsibility for pushing forward the Government’s Post-16 Skills Plan, its response to the Sainsbury Review, published last week (post).

From our point of view on the SkillsPlanner project, another key appointment has been Croydon MP Gavin Barwell, appointed the new housing and planning minister in the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG). Barwell is also minister for London; our two-year SkillsPlanner project is strongly focused on London and the southeast, and we expect Barwell will be working closely with London Mayor Sadiq Khan (post).

And, Cabinet Office minister Ben Gummer, MP for Ipswich, will oversee the government’s own construction strategy (post) and programme, lead on its procurement policy, and also look at digital transformation of government. The latter particularly interests SkillsPlanner; data, much of it provided by government or government-funded organisations and projects, is at the core of our open linked data platform, and the wider construction industry is also engaged in a deeper digital shift outlined in the February 2015 Digital Built Britain strategy (post).

Update (1 August 2016) – At BEIS, Jesse Norman MP, minister for industry and energy, will be responsible for industrial policy covering infrastructure and construction.

Government skills plan promises reform – and data!

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Post-16 Skills Plan

Skills minister Nick Boles has said the UK government accepts and will implement every one of Lord Sainsbury’s 34 recommendations on technical education reform ‘unequivocally where possible within current budget constraints’ (reports Infrastructure Intelligence today).

The government’s Post-16 Skills Plan has been published simultaneously with, and as a response to, the Sainsbury independent panel report on technical and professional education, having been delayed due to the EU referendum (both are available online here). Sainsbury says the UK’s current system of technical education is overly complex and fails to deliver the skills most needed – as a result, the UK lags behind countries including the US, Germany and France in productivity per person.

Sainsbury’s recommendations include setting up distinct and coherent technical education routes for young people, with two modes of learning: employment-based, typically via an apprenticeship; and a college-based option. Government will build this new technical education route, simplifying the system by establishing a common framework of 15 technical education routes – including one for construction – encompassing all occupation types. Currently there are over 13,000 different qualifications available for 16-18 year-olds. Sainsbury also calls for a common initial core of maths and English for all technical qualifications before specialisation.

The report has been welcomed by EngineeringUK chief executive Paul Jackson, who said:

“It’s vital for the future health of the UK economy that young people in sufficient numbers develop the engineering skills that employers need. And it’s equally vital that the routes to developing these skills are student-centred, offering every young person the best possible opportunity to thrive in their chosen industry. …

“Putting employers front and centre of the development of the routes and providing more structured work placements as part of a technical education programme will have a positive impact on the work-readiness of those entering employment, with new recruits and employer both reaping the benefits. Government’s Post 16 Skills Plan is reassuring and has now to be backed with the practical and financial support their implementation will require.”

The Post-16 Skills Plan – some details

The Post-16 Skills Plan shows that construction – currently employing over 1.6 million people – is among the most critical routes to employment, second only to ‘business and administrative’ (2.2m), and currently ahead of ‘engineering and manufacturing’ (1.3m). The Plan will create high-quality, two-year, college-based programmes at the start of each route, suitable for 16–18 year-olds, but which can also be accessed by adults (students aged 19 and over).

New specialist training providers will also be introduced. The provision of university technical colleges (UTCs) will be expanded, and, where industries of national economic or strategic importance are facing particular challenges in recruitment, new National Colleges will be created. These will lead the design and delivery of technical skills training in five key sectors: nuclear, digital skills, high-speed rail, onshore oil and gas, and the creative and cultural industries.

Farmer Review

Rebecca Lovelace of EthosVO in conversation at June 2016 Westminster launch of BuildForce.Importantly, the Skills Plan also commits (sections 7.4 and 7.5) to “taking action in response to the review we have commissioned from the Construction Leadership Council and Mark Farmer (the Farmer Review) of the functioning of the labour market, including skills provision, in the construction sector.” The government will also review the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) and the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board (ECITB), seeking to boost domestic construction skills and drive up productivity in the construction sector. We are pleased to read this – Mark Farmer has taken a keen interest in EthosVO’s SkillsPlanner and in related initiatives such as BuildForce, launched at the Houses of Parliament on 29 June.

More open data (hurray!)

And, of particular interest to SkillsPlanner and its development of an online skills platform driven by Open Linked Data (if you’re not sure what this is, watch Sir Nigel Shadbolt’s explanation) there is also a commitment to releasing more data. Chapter 6 of the Skills Plan makes “Information and data” the first of its key enabling factors. It aims to guide people through the system and make informed choices about what to study by:

“… making more information available about what students go on to do and how much they earn after taking particular routes or apprenticeships, and how the performance of colleges and other training providers influences students’ performance in working life. This information needs to be easy to access and understand so that people can use it to compare different education and career options and make confident and informed choices.

“… For the first time, we are using information held by the Department for Education; the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills; the Department for Work and Pensions; and HM Revenue and Customs to get a better understanding of how young people move through education and into work, and from autumn 2016 we will be making more of this information publicly available….”

Brexit vote hits construction skills

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CM screengrab

Early in the morning of Friday 24 June 2016, the UK construction skills crisis potentially got a whole lot worse.

Once it was announced that the UK had voted to leave the European Union, construction bosses quickly began to wonder about the industry’s reliance on workers from across the English Channel. And, later, as the stock market plummeted – with homebuilders’ and contractors’ shares among the hardest hit – and as the value of sterling dropped to a 31-year low, the challenges facing construction grew even greater.

Of course, to some extent, the existing problems were of our own making. For years, the UK construction industry has failed to recruit and retain sufficient home-grown employees to staff its projects.

Why would people want to join an industry that has for decades been recognised as overly-complex, fragmented and price-fixated in its procurement approaches, adversarial in its supply chain relations, wasteful in its project execution, conservative in its adoption of new technologies, and short-termist and reactive in its approach to human skills development and R&D? (post). That short-termist approach to skills is evident in construction’s failure to retain older workers (Catch them when they’re older), its lack of diversity, and its failure to address fundamental issues that result in the industry being unattractive as a career option (To change the image, first change construction).

pre-referendum survey finding tweeted by ConstructionUKThe Brexit vote makes the skills issue even more challenging. Even before the referendum, many warned that a ‘Leave’ vote might hit construction particularly hard.

Construction industry leaders are now seeking greater collaboration between government and industry to address the skills crisis. For example…

  • the Federation of Master Builders CEO Brian Berry warned that “wrong moves by the Government could result in the skills crisis becoming a skills catastrophe” (reported in Training Journal)
  • Infrastructure Intelligence reported the thoughts of Arcadis consultancy boss, Alan Brookes, who said:

“Construction markets are likely to become more volatile in the short term and we need to consider a joined-up approach to sustaining the capacity and capability of the industry. … One of the big questions we now face is: how can we ensure we have enough people with the right skills to build the houses, roads and rail lines of the future? In the future, European labour may no longer be the safety-valve it has been, so we must plan to use the workforce differently. Using more offsite components and investing in skills and the management of projects will now prove absolutely vital.”

  • The same article also quoted EY’s Malcolm Bairstow:

“A significant proportion of the UK’s builders and construction labour is sourced from Europe and there will be uncertainty over what happens next. If we start to see a movement of these workers out of the UK, this would inevitably cause a slow-down in construction and house-building which could also have a significant impact on development across the country.”

  • And in Construction Manager today, the National Federation of Builders CEO Richard Beresford says: “The lack of skills for the pipeline of work we have is the defining structural issue for the industry. … We need to rethink how we draw people to construction and the breadth of opportunity available.”

At least we have been aware of the skills gap for some years and Government and industry have started to take steps to improve the industry, to foster recruitment and training, and to be more strategic in its pipeline planning. SkillsPlanner is therefore now more important than ever in helping UK construction anticipate future construction skills demand and ensuring there is sufficient supply of well-trained workers to meet that demand.

SkillsPlanner Launch

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Tideway Andy Mitchell at SkillsPlanner launchThe SkillsPlanner project was formally launched on 24 February 2016 at the Institution of Civil Engineers in London. Over 130 guests listened as programme director Rebecca Lovelace introduced the project, followed by keynote speakers Andy Mitchell CBE, CEO of Tideway (right), and Sir Nigel Shadbolt, founding partner of Seme4 – both organisations are SkillsPlanner partners.

Videos


Launch presentations

The launch presentations (mainly comprising Sir Nigel Shadbolt’s slides) are available via Slideshare, or click the image (below) to open a PDF version (7.4MB) – this will open in a new tab.

SkillsPlanner launch title slide

 Listen to our podcast of Tideway’s Andy Mitchell talking about the importance of investing in skills to support our major infrastructure projects (Click on image below – SoundCloud will open in a new tab).

Tideway Andy Mitchell at SkillsPlanner launch

Panel discussion

Following the launch presentations, an expert panel fielded questions from the audience.

Other content

  • Twitter stats SkillsPlanner 24 FebDuring the evening, #SkillsPlanner featured heavily on Twitter, with over 200 tweets from more than 50 contributors. Read our Storify stream from the evening.
  • Read our blog post about the event, and about the buzz it created.
  • See how some SkillsPlanner partners marked the event – like SERIO.

Demonstrating SkillsPlanner

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SkillsPlanner interface slide

Explaining SkillsPlanner has started to get a bit easier. While it is not yet ready for public consumption, we have been developing some of the concepts first shown at the project’s official launch in February and now have our first demonstration environment.

In February, the images used in Sir Nigel Shadbolt’s presentation (watch the video) at the Institution of Civil Engineers were what he described as “slideware”. Today, we have some working prototypes of key elements of the SkillsPlanner platform. For example, in an internal project webinar run by our data and platform package leaders, Gary Hunt and Ian Millard, on 26 April, we were able to show:

  • examples of the kinds of data we are collating from public sources, project partners and collaborators
  • our data catalogue (the list of datasets that we have collated to date to populate the platform)
  • examples of different types of data reports – from simple tables, to pie-chart graphics, to maps showing geographical spreads and densities of data

We are currently exploring a variety of “user stories” – essentially, analysing how individual end-users will interrogate the datasets and understanding what insights they are seeking to get. In some cases we can map their requirements to data that we already have; in other cases, we are learning what data we need to add. Gary outlined some of the next steps:

garyhunt“Some of this data might be publicly available and we’re making good progress cataloguing these. Other data, such as individual learner data, is available but under a restricted license so we’ll be working to gather that data. In all our work, we are being scrupulous in how we filter, aggregate and anonymise data so that no commercially sensitive information is shared and to ensure compliance with the Data Protection Act.”

Questions included: How do we decide what data to include? How will we link training provider courses to job roles? How is our data managed and maintained? and How do we ensure data remains current? (The webinar recording and Q&As are available for collaborators). We will be sharing further developments with project collaborators in another webinar next month (June 2016) as we build towards the point where we can start to show the demonstration platform to a wider industry audience.

To change the image, first change construction

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We need to tackle some of the fundamental issues in the construction industry before we can effectively change “the image of construction”, and wider sharing of data should be part of the solution.

“The image of construction” has featured heavily this week for me (to be honest, it often does – as previous posts probably show).

On Tuesday, I was part of a CIMCIG-led roundtable discussion in London with Mark Farmer, the consultant helping the Construction Leadership Council to address issues relating to construction skills and the future needs of the industry (see gov.uk news release).

Yesterday I joined a panel discussion at the Women in Construction and Engineering Awards day, part of which focused on how current images of construction and engineering make them unattractive to potential entrants, parents, teachers and even careers advisors.

And today, I have been reading in Construction News (YouGov poll finds two-thirds of public would not consider career in construction) about a survey for Construction United showing:

  • more than half of the public view construction work as ‘strenuous’ or ‘dirty’, with just 11 per cent saying it was ‘exciting’
  • 23 per cent viewed construction work as creating ‘mess, traffic and inconvenience’
  • people do not see the industry as academically driven, with 41 per cent saying it was one the least likely sectors to require a further or higher education qualification

Such survey findings are nothing new. They simply confirm that the “image” problem persists year after year despite numerous campaigns to change popular perceptions. Industry insiders maintain that we need to “present how fantastic it is to work in construction and change some of those perceptions… all of us who work in construction love it; we just haven’t been very good collectively at expressing that message” (to quote Suzannah Nicol of Build UK).

To change the image, first change construction

At this week’s CIMCIG meeting, I repeated my view that the “image of construction” is a symptom of a more deep-rooted reputation issue. Bluntly, the industry’s reputation is not just the result of what it says and what others say about it, but – importantly – about what it does and how it behaves.

The reality, evidenced in report after report (read my Ethos blog post: Building a better built environment industry), is that the UK construction industry has for decades been recognised as:

  • overly-complex, fragmented and price-fixated in its procurement approaches
  • adversarial in its supply chain relations
  • poor in its payment practices
  • wasteful in its project execution
  • conservative in its adoption of new technologies, and
  • short-termist and reactive in its approach to human skills development and R&D.

Add to this the ‘macho’ culture on many sites and the painfully slow progress in addressing diversity issues (see: Let’s share more data on skills and diversity), is it any wonder that the industry currently known as construction has an image problem?

At a Constructing Excellence conference in 2014, I said the industry needed to stop thinking of itself as a monolithic entity and start to identify changes it could make across its many disciplines, and then get them communicating, running long-term, integrated, pan-sector campaigns, and working collaboratively with partners, trade bodies and (most importantly, perhaps) its customers and end-users. Currently though, we seem to be more focused on trying to fix the image, rather than fixing the reasons behind that image.

It’s not just about campaigns

CITB’s Jane Gleave was at the CIMCIG meeting and talked about the GoConstruct campaign (read my pwcom post); last month I noted the launch at Ecobuild of Build UK’s new video; and this week’s story in Construction News (which launched its own #LoveConstruction campaign in July 2013) is based on a poll undertaken for yet another campaign, Construction United, launched in February 2016 and building towards a week of events in October.

And while we’re talking about “image”, to me it is unfortunate that the campaign’s home page perpetuates a view of construction as site-based. Efforts are being made by the Chartered Institute of Building, among others, to get government agencies to accept wider definitions of construction that take account of the inputs of product manufacturers and of professions such as architects, engineers and quantity surveyors, according to a Construction Index report today. We also tend to underplay the key roles played in many construction businesses by accountants, lawyers, marketing, PR, HR and IT people, plus a myriad of administrators.

Nonetheless, Construction United does recognise that there is already an industrial strategy looking to address some of the underlying problems:

constructionunited“Construction 2025 identified a number of areas that needed addressing, so Construction United aims to bring everyone with a vested interest in construction together to raise awareness of the key issues facing the sector, including image, skills gaps and the wellbeing of employees at all levels.”

It’s not just about raising awareness of the key issues, but actually doing something about them. Construction 2025 and the Government Construction Strategy 2016-2020 (see previous post: Tackling skills gaps – can we learn from BIM?) prescribe a suite of changes aimed at making construction and the built environment more cost effective and sustainable. The BIM programme has shown that the industry can collaborate to tackle the underlying fragmented structures, silo-based attitudes, anti-collaborative behaviours and out-dated technologies – and BIM shows we can be sophisticated users of technology and data, not just stereotyped wielders of bricks, concrete and steel.

If government can inspire such changes in project delivery, surely it can work with industry so that construction skills provision also benefits from even more collaboration and more sharing of data? Incidentally, the UK was confirmed yesterday as the world’s leader in Open Data (see the 3rd Open Data Barometer report).

WhereTheWorkIsWhere the Work Is

Through the SkillsPlanner project, we see some signs this is beginning to happen. Yesterday, for example, SkillsPlanner programme director Rebecca Lovelace attended an Institute for Public Policy Research launch of a jobs and skills tool called Where The Work Is. This jobs data platform draws on historic data on over 1.5 million jobs posted online by employers across all sectors in the UK from 2012 to 2014 and normalised against government data on vacancies, and we have incorporated some of the same datasets into our developing SkillsPlanner data catalogue. Clearly, we would welcome more contributions of data to help improve our understanding of the construction skills supply and demand challenges.

Incidentally, Where The Work Is also provided supporting data for a report, “Jobs and Skills in London: Building a More Responsive Skills System in the Capital” (download PDF), which recommended that the Greater London Authority might be given a more active role in funding adult education providers, and be given the capability to shift to a results-based funding model for adult skills in the future. This fits neatly with some of the aspirations we have for SkillsPlanner – if we can demonstrate its success in construction, we feel its data-driven approach can be applied to many other sectors of the economy too.

Digital skills and the fourth industrial revolution

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The Fourth Industrial Revolution will demand a more long-term, whole career view of future digital skills needs.

The SkillsPlanner project aims to create an open linked data platform connecting those needing people with relevant construction skills (demand) with those able to educate and train people to gain those skills (supply). With the UK construction skills gap currently a subject of almost daily debate, it is little wonder the Government Construction Strategy 2016-2020 devoted a large section to meeting near-term needs (see Government recognises skills planning needs), and we read almost daily reports about new initiatives to train new workers and retain existing ones.

However, given that many of today’s teenagers have a working life of 50 or more years ahead of them, they – alongside existing workers – will need to be constantly updating their knowledge and digital skills throughout their careers, or planning for future career changes.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

Evidence certainly suggests they cannot rely on their employers equipping them with the right expertise. In November 2015, for example, a study published by Vodafone and YouGov (news release) showed that, while businesses were aware of the need to keep pace with technological developments (in particular, digital technologies), around half doubted they would be able to keep up over the next five years – let alone five decades.

We only need to look back over the past 30 years to see how technology has transformed just about every aspect of our daily lives. Many of today’s business leaders in their 50s started their careers before email, before the worldwide web, before mobile telephones. Digital technologies have already transformed how we interact and work – and the pace of change shows no signs of slowing down.

Indeed, the World Economic Forum says we stand on the brink of a technological sea change – the Fourth Industrial Revolution – that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. WEF founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab describes this latest Revolution:

Fourth Industrial Revolution“The possibilities of billions of people connected by mobile devices, with unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to knowledge, are unlimited. And these possibilities will be multiplied by emerging technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.

“Already, artificial intelligence is all around us, from self-driving cars and drones to virtual assistants and software that translate or invest. Impressive progress has been made in AI in recent years, driven by exponential increases in computing power and by the availability of vast amounts of data…. Digital fabrication technologies, meanwhile, are interacting with the biological world on a daily basis. Engineers, designers, and architects are combining computational design, additive manufacturing, materials engineering, and synthetic biology to pioneer a symbiosis between microorganisms, our bodies, the products we consume, and even the buildings we inhabit.”

Future built environment

Shwab says our response to this Fourth Industrial Revolution must be integrated and comprehensive, and involve all stakeholders. Yet, according to some critics, UK construction policy-makers seem focused on meeting immediate or short-term skills and physical infrastructure needs, and applying a narrow view of current technologies.

In Workplace Insight, for example, Mark Eltringham says “the Government seems to be largely unaware of or uninterested in what is happening beyond its bubble,” noting the Government Construction Strategy 2016-2020 “uses the word technology three times and, even then, only with regard to the application of BIM [building information modelling] as a way of improving the construction process.” He continues:

“Perhaps more worryingly, the very short section at the end of the document on whole life approaches only deals with the issue of sustainability. It makes no mention of creating the physical infrastructure capable of dealing with a rapidly changing world. [And] … the Government’s commitment to invest in technological infrastructure is woefully inadequate compared to its focus on physical infrastructure.”

Future skills

BIM2050 logoWhat also seems to be lacking is a more wide-ranging and longer-term debate about future digital skills. One exception is SkillsPlanner collaborator BIM2050 which – as its name suggests – dares to look decades ahead; in 2014 it produced a report: Built Environment 2050: A Report on our Digital Future (available here, PDF) which, alongside some wider views of other trends, made some predictions about future skills needs:

  • In the 2020s: “construction roles will be diluted/hybrid versions of their previously heavily-siloed forms. There will be a significant focus on up-skilling the existing workforce. … Computational and analytical skills will emerge as a valued area.”
  • In the 2030s: “Skills within the industry will focus on the flow and process of information procurement and transactions throughout the supply chain. Sought after skills … will surround analytics and the ability to understand ‘big data’, [and] predictive data analysis.”
  • In the 2040s: “the skilled workforce will be reduced to 50% of its level in 2013. … Skills and roles will become more focused on the operation, maintenance and redevelopment of existing assets rather than the building of new assets. … Automated assembly and digital manufacturing will see a need for further support in designing digital systems which will allow for the creation of smarter material that ultimately responds to its environment.”

Ethos, SkillsPlanner and Future Cities

As we enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we will increasingly – as Schwab said – need a comprehensive, integrated and inclusive response embracing all stakeholders, with silos broken down and connections made between public policy-making, infrastructure planning, and investment in education and technology.

Future-gazing is all very well, but it also needs to be matched by a willingness to test new ways of living, working and interacting in our built environment. This fits with the vision of Ethos, and in particular its recent establishment of a business sector focused on Future Cities, in parallel with Ethos Skills. Future Cities currently has three product lines – focused on Parking, Retail and Active Mobility – all focused on particular human interactions with their surroundings, and deploying technology and using real-time data to help people and organisations better manage transportation and other aspects of their built environment.

Like our friends at BIM2050, we are excited about the prospects of creating new combinations of people, processes and technologies. We believe tomorrow’s leaders – some of them, perhaps, just about to start their careers – in the industry currently known as construction will be the ones that anticipate best and respond quickest to the multi-faceted challenges of delivering an increasingly digital built environment in the mid 21st century.

 

Government recognises skills planning needs

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GCS 2016-20

It was with some trepidation that we looked at the latest UK Government Construction Strategy 2016-20, released last week (available here). The previous strategy, Construction 2025 (published in July 2013) and the wider-ranging Digital Built Britain strategy (February 2015 – read our July 2015 blog post: Building a better built environment industry) were both produced under the coalition government, but the current administration has reduced some elements of government engagement with the construction sector – the Construction Leadership Council was pared back, and the post of Government Chief Construction Advisor was discontinued. Would the Government, collectively construction’s biggest single client, be reining back its industry ambitions?

Data and skills

The initial signs, however, are encouraging. The direction of travel remains broadly the same, with heightened commitment to “digital and data capability,” and to improving the sector’s skills and resilience. In the ministerial forward, Lord Bridges says:

“we need to improve skills, both within government and the construction sector overall. Our strategy aims to improve government’s capacity and capability as a client, while helping the sector recruit and retain skilled employees.”

The body of the strategy mentions apprenticeships (“delivering 20,000 apprenticeships through central government procurement over this Parliament”), it talks about the need for skills in building information modelling (BIM; read our previous post: Tackling skills gaps: can we learn from BIM?) – still a major component of the digital vision – and then underlines the major skills challenges:

“Employers are facing difficulties in attracting skilled employees and 13% of employers reported not having enough skilled employees for some of 2014. This skills gap, if not addressed, will lead to inflation and reduced productivity in the way the industry operates. … Young people are currently underrepresented in the construction industry compared to the economy as a whole, only around 10% are aged between 19 and 24.”

Skills planning tools

Interestingly, to support its skills drive, the strategy says the Construction Leadership Council is developing a guide on what good skills investment looks like, to aid both government procurers and the industry when bidding for future government contracts. And since publishing its National Infrastructure Plan for Skills (September 2015), Infrastructure UK, now part of the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, is developing a tool to help clients utilise pipeline data to model current and future skills requirements. There is also talk of “sharing market intelligence.”

We hope these ambitions are carried through, and that there is a lot of joined-up thinking. As we have previously argued (Data for efficiency and growth), there is considerable scope to take the government’s enlightened approach to open data, and to pair this with ongoing initiatives – such as SkillsPlanner (part government-funded through Innovate UK) – that are focused on improving the match of skills to jobs and enabling training provision to be responsive to industry needs.