Tag Archives: CITB

Construction “on a knife-edge”

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The latest Construction Skills Network report from the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) suggests the health of the construction industry over the next five years is on a knife-edge, heavily dependent of a few politically sensitive infrastructure projects of huge scope, according to new industry forecasts.

Industry fortunes depend on smooth progress for big projects like the £18bn Hinkley Point C and £14bn Wylfa Newydd nuclear power stations, and the £55bn HS2 rail project.

The 2017-2021 Construction Skills Network (CSN) report predicts growth of 1.7% over the next five years, with 179,000 jobs to be created, reports The Construction Index this week.

Arcadis Brexit imageA year ago (read our blog post), before the EU referendum, CSN was forecasting 2.5% average annual growth and 232,000 new jobs needed. After the referendum, CSN downgraded its growth forecast to 2% a year and industry-wide recruitment need to 157,000 (we noted the potential Brexit impact in June 2016, and highlighted the Brexit views of Arcadis in November 2016 too).

The new CSN forecast suggests the fortunes of the post-Brexit construction industry are heavily dependent on the big politically sensitive infrastructure projects starting main works on time as infrastructure represents 45% of all predicted construction growth over the next five years.

Brexit impact

With the UK withdrawing from the EU, job growth in the UK construction industry will be slower than indicated in last year’s report, but construction overall still needs 35,000 new workers every year.

As these projects are particularly politically sensitive, the report makes clear that the forecasts are heavily qualified, making it unclear what weight should be put upon them. “All predictions for the construction sector are made against a backdrop of ongoing political and economic uncertainty. The impact on the construction pipeline of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union is one of the most significant unknowns,” the report says.

Infrastructure key

It adds:

“As wider economic turbulence can affect many parts of construction, the commitment to infrastructure is helpful to the forecast. But, with output growth so reliant on these major projects, any shifting of the goalposts on, for example HS2 or nuclear new build could be felt throughout the industry. If, for example, Hinkley was taken out of the pipeline, total construction output for 2021 would be 0.8% lower than currently predicted. And the reliance on large infrastructure projects means that forecasts, particularly those made over the longer term, are less balanced than in the past.

“However, the changing of the guard at the top of government in the UK has, so far, not affected its commitment to the National Infrastructure Delivery Plan. The government is still pledged to invest over £100 billion in infrastructure by 2021.”

It continues:

“Profitability remains a concern, with the volatility of material and labour costs squeezing margins. The situation is not helped by deteriorating levels of productivity, and there is also the prospect of a potential gap in the labour market resulting from any changes to immigration policy.”

The CSN report shows there will be job opportunities in particular for carpenters (+3,850 per year), electricians and insulators (+2,250), process managers (+2,150) and a range of IT and other technical workers (+5,240).

CITB director of policy Steve Radley said:

“We expect construction to keep defying the economic headwinds, with almost half of its growth coming from Hinkley, HS2 and Wylfa and other infrastructure projects.  These huge projects give our industry a great chance to seize the initiative on skills and start investing in the next generation and upskilling the current one. So it’s vital that we don’t throw this opportunity away by allowing these projects to slip or get squeezed together and worsen the pressure on key skills.”

CITB interim chief executive Sarah Beale said:

“While we are forecasting slower growth for our industry than we were last year, employers will still be creating tens of thousands of new jobs. We will be working with employers to attract new talent into our industry and to train them for rewarding careers in the sector.

“While we have factored Brexit into this forecast, there remain many unknowns to life after leaving the EU. We will be working with our industry to understand what it means for our migrant workforce and what we must do to attract and grow more of our own.”

Housing white paper: little new on skills

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Fixing our broken housing market

The Government’s new Housing White Paper, Fixing our Broken Housing Market, mentions skills 20 times (most of the mentions are on page 41) in a largely underwhelming document over 100 pages long. However, it doesn’t say anything particularly new or radical about skills – though this is perhaps to be expected from a Conservative Government writing about an inherently conservative industry (and house-building is, arguably, the most conservative sector within construction).

It makes a passing mention of Mark Farmer’s review, Modernise or Die, published in October 2016 (read our post), touching on his advocacy of offsite fabrication (read this Construction Index summary, for example), and acknowledges that the industry faces particular challenges in certain regions, such as London and the South East, as Brexit looms. It continues:

“This is an important moment and we should make the most of the opportunity for industry to invest in its workforce, alongside tackling the issues raised by the Farmer Review. The larger companies need to take responsibility for ensuring that they have a sustainable supply chain, working with contractors to address skills requirements.”

Three areas are singled out for Government action. It says it will:

  • Post-16 Skills Plan“change the way the Government supports training in the construction industry” – This will include the conclusion of an ongoing review, chaired by Paul Morrell, of the Construction Industry Training Board’s purpose, functions and operations, with the government looking to “ensure that developers benefitting from public funding use the projects to train the workforce of the future.”
  • “launch a new route into construction in September 2019” – as announced in the Skills Plan produced in July 2016 (blog post), it says it will “streamline the number of courses available and improve quality and employability”
  • “work across Government, with the Construction Leadership Council, to challenge house builders and other construction companies to deliver their part of the bargain.”

The white paper then highlights what can be achieved from investing in training as part of major construction programmes such as Crossrail, to see whether this approach can be applied more broadly in the construction sector, particularly by holding developers and local authorities to account. This is mainly about improving transparency of the end-to-end house building process, and identifying where blockages lie (encouragingly there are three mentions of “transparent data”). This could be an areas where SkillsPlanner’s modelling of supply and demand of construction skills could play a crucial role, as Mark Farmer pointed out last year.

farmer review cover“The increasing importance of data means that such approaches would better enable the business case for investment in training and new ways of delivering by better aligning investment to a demand pipeline. … The culture of ‘data silos’ within the industry needs to be broken as part of the wider societal democratisation of data.”

 

Time to apply some military and manufacturing know-how?

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Module Building in factory environment

The UK construction skills crisis continues to delay projects, drive up costs and reduce quality. As we have discussed several times on the SkillsPlanner blog, the government and industry have produced various reports and instituted various campaigns, but the skills gap challenge is deep-rooted.

With the Global Financial Crisis wreaking havoc in 2007-2009 and plunging national construction industries around the world into recession, the UK shed hundreds of thousands of workers, many of whom never returned to the industry. As the UK emerged, somewhat shakily, from recession, replacing these workers has not been helped by the industry’s poor reputation – itself a symptom of deep systemic problems (To change the image, first change construction), including a lack of diversity, an ageing workforce, and decades of under-investment in research and development so that construction is rock-bottom of the digitalisation league, notwithstanding the efforts to promote technologies such as BIM (Tackling skills gaps – can we learn from BIM?).

We have welcomed government plans to reform post-16 education (post) and we are looking closely at recently announced changes to the UK apprenticeship levy scheme (summarised by TES here; the CITB suggests the changes could cut apprenticeship funding by a third). But we still think construction needs to adopt a long-term view of its skills and employment needs, and to be thinking about digital skills and the fourth industrial revolution.

Military-style skills provision?

We are not alone in this view. Gary Sullivan, CEO of construction logistics and security business Wilson James has urged much the same kind of new thinking. In a hard-hitting open letter to the recently reshuffled skills minister Robert Halfon MP published in Construction Manager magazine, Sullivan writes:

Gary Sullivan“… we need more than builders. We need to manufacture off site, we need people with good hand-to-eye co-ordination, we need people who can use state-of-the-art tools who can produce quality at speed again and again. The precious few young people who want to join the industry are being given the wrong skills and it is taking too long to train them in the wrong skills.”

He continues:

“We need to train differently, get people in at ground level and get them working. We could look at how the military train young people. In less than 18 weeks they produce the highest skill levels with technical expertise and a great work ethic. We have to invest in off-site manufacturing and in parallel train the workforce to fit, erect and plug in the state-of-the-art products created in factories in our Northern Powerhouse. Our ambition should be more F1 than 1961.”

It is no surprise that Sullivan mentions the military. Before founding Wilson James 25 years ago, Sullivan spent seven years in the paratroopers, and then worked for the UN where he learned about logistics. Upon return to civilian life, he worked initially as a logistics and security manager for Bovis Lend Lease on projects in the City of London, noting how much construction could benefit from improved logistics. Today, Wilson James employs over 3000 people, has an annual turnover in excess of £100m, and has recruited extensively from armed forces leavers.

BuildForce square 720pxBuilding a strong transition pathway from the armed forces into construction is actively supported by SkillsPlanner project leaders at Ethos (many present at the Westminster launch of BuildForce at the Houses of Parliament on 29 June). As Sullivan suggests, military personnel can quickly gain technical skills and have a strong work ethic, while many in senior ranks have both professional and managerial skills and attitudes that equip them well for work not just in construction as we currently know it, but in what construction might become over the next decade or two.

Modern methods of construction

Such thinking is already being applied in other countries which face similar challenges to the UK. For example, according to a 2015 Ford Foundation report, more than 2.3 million advanced manufacturing jobs in the United States are unfilled and over the next decade an estimated 2.7 million baby boomers will retire from this sector. In California, Workshops for Warriors is training veterans in advanced manufacturing – “Today we train veterans to make products, but tomorrow we will train them to train robots to make products,” says founder Hernàn Luis y Prado. Workshops for Warriors is also partnering with online learning provider SolidProfessor to provide additional skills in engineering software use, including several Autodesk applications familiar in construction.

Manufacturing is hugely important in construction. Common stereotypes of construction tend to focus on design offices or site-based activities, overlooking the key inputs of manufacturers and suppliers. In the UK, according to the Construction Products Association, the sector directly provides jobs for 313,000 people across 21,000 companies and has an annual turnover of more than £50 billion. And this importance is set to grow as the industry expands its adoption of Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) approaches in the coming years.

Sullivan rightly highlights the importance of off-site manufacture, and challenges the industry to become more like Formula 1 precision engineering. There are encouraging signs, even within one of the most conservative of UK construction sectors: housebuilding:

  • Earlier this year, Legal and General announced plans to “do for housing what Henry Ford did for the modern automotive industry” by manufacturing modular homes
  • Property Week recently reported the UK government and the mayor of London are drawing up plans to use modular construction to tackle the housing crisis
  • And when a skills crisis and a housing crisis coincide, you also need to review house-building skills (post).

Similar DfMA/off-site thinking is being applied to infrastructure projects and in relation to public and commercial buildings. Therefore, as Sullivan says, “We need to train differently“. We should be equipping people with 21st century technology skills, and breaking out of our traditional construction silos to learn from what the military, logistics and manufacturing can show us.

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….”

Addressing the skills gap

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CIRIA logo

It is always helpful to engage with fellow industry professionals as we seek to improve UK construction, and I am looking forward to presenting with my SkillsPlanner colleague Chris Dransfield at next month’s CIRIA half-day conference, “Addressing the skills gap“, in London on 6 July 2016.

As you would expect of a research and information organisation, the CIRIA event will look at recent and current surveys and academic research highlighting current shortages and gaps in skills (some of which have previously been discussed on our SkillsPlanner blog), including:

The CITB CSN, for example, predicts sustained growth from 2016-2020 of 2.5% every year and says we could require 232,000 new jobs, driven largely by infrastructure and private housing, with new nuclear power stations at Hinkley Point, Somerset, and Wylfa, Anglesey, alongside rail projects such as Crossrail and HS2, and increases in house-building.

The CIRIA conference will explore current industry initiatives, research and trends within the construction skills gap area, and will enable the sharing of ideas and best practice through presentations and discussion relating to these initiatives and trends. We are looking forward to discussing:

  • How can we make the construction industry more attractive to graduates and school leavers and what are the barriers to attracting new talent?
  • What are the current models of graduate schemes and apprenticeships and what initiatives are currently challenging and improving these processes?
  • What are the future skills (digital, off site manufacturing, sustainability skills) that we need develop through staff training and apprenticeships, and how can we diversify the opportunities for people entering the construction sector?
  • How can we ensure supportive and inclusive environments and improve retention rates?
  • Can skills provision adapt to accommodate changing construction environments and technologies?

If these are questions that you have been asking in your own organisations, it would be great to meet you at the conference on 6 July.

Tackling skills gaps – can we learn from BIM?

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CITB 2016-2020 forecast

One of the UK construction industry’s biggest trade shows, Ecobuild, was held at ExCEL in east London this week. Despite its name, the three-day event is no longer just focused on sustainability, but features a host of seminars and conference sessions to update and inform attendees about various current industry issues. Not surprisingly, the skills shortage was identified as a hot topic, with speakers in the main conference arena discussing the Next Generation yesterday.

Broadcaster Daisy McAndrew introduced Pauline Traetto, academy director of the BRE Academy, who briefly talked about the findings of its latest skills gap survey. She was followed by David Hancock, head of construction at the Cabinet Office, then Suzannah Nichol, chief executive of construction contractors trade body Build UK, with Steven Radley, policy and strategic planning director of the CITB (also a partner on BRE’s research), bringing up the rear. In a short session, the four could do little more than skate over some of the challenges facing the industry, with the new BRE survey providing some useful context.

The skills crisis (again)

BRE Academy graphicAs if we needed reminding, the BRE Academy survey findings (based on 300+ industry respondents, surveyed November 2015 – to January 2016; survey summary here; news release) confirmed:

  • the poor public image of construction – 91% of respondents said people outside the industry have a different perspective on the industry to those within it.
  • the continued gender diversity gap (see Let’s share more data on skills and diversity),
  • the lack of clear and appealing career pathways (74% of respondents said these should be ‘actively promoted’ – good excuse later for a disco-pounding Build UK video!), and
  • skills shortages – in sustainability, environmental and trade skills, plus building information modelling (BIM) and smart technology skills, and – interestingly – communication skills.

BRE Academy Director Pauline Traetto said:

“Construction currently contributes £92 billion a year to the UK economy with a workforce of 3 million people. In order to support future growth in the UK as well as rapid expansion in developing countries a talented, engaged workforce is critical. Only by grappling with the skills shortage highlighted in this report in areas like sustainability and digital design will the industry be able to deliver a low carbon, high performance future.”

Not really a crisis – more a deep structural challenge

Coincidentally, another academy has also just reported findings from its annual trend survey and mentioned communications. Albeit from another small sample, the PR Academy identified crisis communication and public affairs as the top skills gaps among communicators. This set me thinking….

The construction industry skills ‘crisis’ has been a long-standing issue, so is perhaps not what most communication professionals would define as a crisis (usually something which flares up unexpectedly and creates an immediate reputation issue). But the mentions of communication skills and of public affairs were perhaps more appropriate, for the symptoms of the problem were plain to see at Ecobuild.

The UK Government is keenly aware of the need to address the skills shortage and wants industry to help it resolve the issue, but a key challenge is industry fragmentation. Even just focused on the conference platform, we had two bodies – Build UK and CITB – organising seemingly separate campaigns (Build UK showed its Get Into Construction video, while the CITB talked about its three-year Go Construct campaign) to promote the industry. And there are literally hundreds of other construction professional and trade associations – many of which are separately engaged in similar, but often disconnected, campaigns.

But it is not impossible to orchestrate the industry to achieve some major changes. It just takes concerted action (and funding) from the government and from industry to do so. BIM is a particularly topical example.

Follow the BIM example

Skills needs - BIM and communicationIn 2009, the appointment of the first chief construction advisor started what has become a powerful modernising movement aimed at making construction and the built environment more cost effective and sustainable (“Cash is King, but Carbon is Queen” was the Paul Morrell mantra). BIM is just a minor part of a suite of changes pushed in successive government construction strategies. But because deployment of BIM was made mandatory for businesses wanting to work on centrally procured public sector projects from April 2016, we have seen an unprecedented effort to change industry practices, cultures and behaviours, as well as technologies, to accommodate this new (still evolving) and more collaborative way of working.

Breaking down silos is a constant refrain within project teams; progressive clients and their supply chains are also developing longer-term approaches to procurement (frameworks, alliancing, etc); government is demanding “open, shareable asset information”; and we are moving from analogue, largely paper-based processes to digital working.

Such changes will help transform “the image of the industry” but they will do it more quickly if they are sustained by the same government-impelled, pan-industry effort achieved to push collaborative BIM and related commercial, legal and cultural changes. In short, the BIM campaign has progressed because it has wasn’t just about “image”, but about addressing the underlying fragmented structures, attitudes, behaviours and technologies. We need to do the same for construction careers.

Collaboration and data are key

SkillsPlannerLogoLargeSkillsPlanner has grand ambitions but is on a (currently) much smaller scale. We have already managed to create a growing consortium of clients, contractors, local authorities and other industry organisations, plus some technology and data specialists, and got them collaborating, collating and sharing skills-related data. By maintaining our pan-industry approach and by basing our platform on future-proof Open Linked Data, we think we can make great strides in helping the industry tackle its skills shortages. But we need more industry organisations, and more joined-up data, to support our effort….

Construction skills: an intelligence briefing

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SERIOsummaryp1

Not only is the UK construction industry very fragmented – something we mentioned when talking about building a better built environment industry – it is also very dynamic: it is a sector which is constantly moving and changing. As a result, the SkillsPlanner team must constantly monitor relevant developments, shifts and trends in employment, education, training, skills and technologies.

To help keep all our stakeholders updated about such changes, Plymouth University’s SERIO applied research unit is part of our team, and it recently produced its first intelligence briefing on the UK construction industry skills landscape (PDF) – one of several SkillsPlanner background briefings now available in our media section. A series of SERIO briefings will be published throughout the two-year SkillsPlanner programme, written in clear, non-academic English, and intended to engage our audiences with the ongoing R&D project.

The state of the construction sector

As we are still in the early intelligence and data-gathering phases, the first briefing provides a broad initial overview of the key issues affecting the demand and supply of skills within the construction sector in London and the southeast. On the demand side, the ageing workforce (see previous post), technological changes such as adoption of modern methods of construction, government regulations, and the impact of the recession are summarised. On Supply of skilled workers, the briefing looks at:

  • the industry’s (in)ability to attract potential recruits
  • employer attitudes
  • the limited completion of apprenticeships
  • regional imbalances in qualification levels
  • migration
  • volume of training provision, and
  • local issues affecting travel to work or training.

The briefing then outlines recent developments including the establishment of the National Infrastructure Commission (post), changes in apprenticeship funding, plus funding for further and higher education, and area-based reviews. As well as giving a readable outline of key changes, the briefing also includes hyperlinks to source information.

New data

CITB 2016-2020 forecastPerhaps inevitably, given the volatility of the industry, almost as soon as we published the briefing, one of these sources was updated. Today, we’ve been browsing through the latest CITB/Experian Construction Skills Network Forecasts 2016-2020, which shows over 230,000 new construction jobs need to be created across the UK by 2020.

We believe SkillsPlanner will help the UK meet that target, and in this video, project director Rebecca Lovelace describes how.

We will be publishing more information about the project throughout the next two years. Another, longer, video (including a clip filmed at SERIO in Plymouth) will be published later this month when we formally launch the SkillsPlanner project at the Institution of Civil Engineers in London on 24 February. If you haven’t received an invitation and would like to come to this event, please email us at [email protected].