Tag Archives: National Infrastructure Plan for Skills

The deadline for responses to the UK Government’s industrial strategy green paper (published on 23 January 2017) passed last week, and it’s been interesting to monitor some of the responses that are now being published (here is what the Open Data Institute had to say, for example).

Little mention of construction

But before we look quickly at two of the responses, what did the green paper set out to do for construction? Well, it mentioned construction just seven times (excluding notes and photo acknowledgements) in 138 pages. And the pressing challenge of construction skills shortages is only fleetingly addressed on page 53:

“There have also been problems with the delivery of schemes. Projects have been delayed by years and provided at excessive cost. There has been improvement in recent years, but the local planning and consent system still remains a contributing factor in some instances. There has also been fragmentation in the construction sector and its supply chain, with businesses often unable to deliver long term investment at large scale. This is combined with shortages in key construction skills.”

However, it does highlight some “acute and urgent skills shortages in key industrial sectors including infrastructure and the nuclear industry”, noting that in some sectors (road and rail, for example) action is already being taken through the creation of sector-specific national colleges. But it highlights:

“… previous efforts by the Government and industry to forecast skills shortages have lacked the accuracy to enable timely and effective action, and that further action could be taken to ensure that we can better identify and address future shortages.” (p.45)

Clearly, we feel these are areas where SkillsPlanner could help, particularly if central and local government, plus industry and training organisations, collaborated better.

Developing skills

The subject of ‘skills,’ on the other hand, is a central theme in the consultation paper. The document discusses ten pillars to its strategy, of which the second is Developing skills:

“Developing skills – we must help people and businesses to thrive by: ensuring everyone has the basic skills needed in a modern economy; building a new system of technical education to benefit the half of young people who do not go to university; boosting STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) skills, digital skills and numeracy; and by raising skill levels in lagging areas.” (p.11)

On these ‘lagging areas’, it points out that we have a shortage of technical-level skills, that we rank 16th out of 20 OECD countries for the proportion of people with technical qualifications, and that we have particular skills shortages in sectors that depend on STEM subjects (p.16). Alarmingly, when, within the next two decades, 90 per cent of jobs will require some digital proficiency, 23 per cent of adults lack basic digital skills.

It also suggests that industry has to help shape qualifications and the curriculum – for technical qualifications in particular – to ensure they are useful to future employers (p.37). Much of the skills strategy reflects thinking already shared in the July 2016 Skills plan (post).

AoC and ICE responses

One of our partners on the SkillsPlanner project is the Association of Colleges (AoC), and its response (delivered jointly with the Open University) to the consultation paper strongly welcomes the focus on developing skills. It calls for:

“a coherent national skills strategy, designed with flexibility to meet individual’s needs and circumstances and those of employers; one that pulls together and builds on the best of what is already out there through collaboration and partnership.”

Given the importance placed on infrastructure in the consultation paper, the Institution of Civil Engineers’ response is particularly pertinent, and in the first of its three key recommendations, puts “demand scenarios” and “foresight on skills needs” right at the heart of future planning:

Regional infrastructure pipelines should be developed to address skills gaps
Realising growth through infrastructure requires improved skills provision. To give a fuller picture of demand scenarios, regional infrastructure pipelines identifying upcoming projects and providing foresight on skills needs, should be put in place.

Government recognises skills planning needs

29 March 2016

Paul Wilkinson

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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.

SkillsPlanner: data for efficiency and growth

25 January 2016

Paul Wilkinson

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SkillsPlanner’s planned use of linked and open data to collate construction skills supply and demand data fits with wider ambitions to make data a driver for economic growth and prosperity.

According to a recent RICS survey reported in the construction trade press (see this Construction Enquirer article, for example), skills shortages are hampering construction projects across the UK. With subcontractors facing rising wage bills, it is becoming more difficult for them to accurately forecast project costs, causing delays to project planning.

And this is not just a short-term problem. Significant skills gaps lasting into the next decade have been identified by research including the London Chamber of Commerce & Industry/KPMG 2014 report ‘Skills to Build’ (PDF here) and the September 2015 National Infrastructure Plan for Skills (PDF here). It is timely, therefore, that the Ethos-led and Innovate UK-funded SkillsPlanner research and development project is now well under way.

What is SkillsPlanner?

SkillsPlanner is an innovative, collaborative, data-powered approach to addressing construction industry skills shortages. Its ambition is to help ensure that the UK has the right people, with the right skills, in the right places, at the right time.

The two-year, £1.3m research and development programme, funded by Innovate UK and the project partners – Ethos, GoodPeople, Association of Colleges, Camden, Islington and Westminster councils, Seme4, Tideway, and University of Plymouth – is initially focused on the London construction sector. However, we intend to develop and expand the project across the UK in the coming months.

Building a data infrastructure

The Ethos-led partnership was successful in the IUK competition, ‘Solving Urban Challenges Through Data’, and was awarded a grant to conduct a Collaborative Research and Development project, which started formally on 1 October 2015. Further project collaborators providing contribution-in-kind include Crossrail and Greenwich council.

SkillsPlanner aims to help industry, employers, councils, trainers and, ultimately, individual workers to collaborate and share data to enable effective planning for future employment needs. It will be based on a cutting edge Linked and Open Data platform that can aggregate, integrate and analyse skills data from a variety of sources to provide a valuable ’real time’ picture of the skills landscape, mapping industry demand against current training provision.

It is particularly fitting that we are using data to supply construction skills fit for our future homes, buildings and other infrastructure.

Data: an “engine for growth and efficiency”

Our world is increasingly data-driven, and government and industry organisations are beginning to adapt to these changes – if we look again at construction, for example, there has been a strong push to get government projects delivered using data-centric building information modelling processes, mandatory from April 2016.

We are also encouraged by initiatives from the Open Data Institute, with whom we have close links – the ODI chairman and co-founder, Sir Nigel Shadbolt, is talking at our SkillsPlanner launch in London on 24 February, and also chairs Seme4, one of the SkillsPlanner partners. The ODI is urging government to consider data as infrastructure that is fundamental to the operation of a modern society and its economy. With the Royal Statistical Society, the ODI wrote an open letter to the chairman of the new UK Infrastructure Commission saying:

“We are not currently treating data as infrastructure. We are not giving it the same importance as our road, railway and energy networks were given in the industrial revolution and are still given now. We risk seeing data only as a tool for transparency when it should also be an engine of efficiency and growth.”

We like this ambition; it fits with Ethos’s culture and with our ambitions for SkillsPlanner. We want this data platform to harness the power of linked and open data and to be scalable and replicable across many industry sectors – improving the match of skills to jobs, reducing unemployment, increasing local labour supply, and enabling training provision to be responsive to industry needs. If we succeed in this mission, then data will be playing a key role in helping to boost our economy.

Government industrial strategy light on construction skills