Tag Archives: skills gap

Government industrial strategy light on construction skills

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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.

What ‘a hard Brexit’ means for skills

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Arcadis Brexit image

Industry debate about the impacts of Brexit continues to rage (we blogged about it back in June), and analysis by consultancy Arcadis (read news release; it’s also been reported on Construction Enquirer) suggests that a ‘hard’ Brexit could lead to a reduction of 215,000 people in the UK construction industry – equivalent to around 14% of the workforce.

Arcadis says that a potential ‘hard’ Brexit scenario – such as extending the points-based system currently in place for non-EU migrants – could see EU construction workers leaving the industry at a quicker rate than they can be replaced. If this plays out, Arcadis estimates that almost 215,000 fewer people from the EU would enter the infrastructure and house building sectors between now and 2020.

Even with a ‘soft’ Brexit, the construction workforce could again reduce in numbers. Arcadis’s analysis of a quotas scenario and sector-specific policies allowing some EU migration into the sector still forecast that 136,000 fewer EU nationals would come to the UK to work in construction.

Arcadis director of workforce planning James Bryce said:

“What started as a skills gap could soon become a skills gulf. The British construction sector has been built on overseas labour for generations, and restrictions of any sort – be it hard or soft Brexit – will hit the industry. Missing out on over 200,000 people entering the workforce could mean rising costs for business, and much needed homes and transport networks being delayed. In recent decades, there has been a massive push towards tertiary education which has seen a big drop in the number of British people with the specific skills we need. If we cannot import the right people, we will need to quickly ramp up training and change the way we build.

“Be it hard or soft Brexit, we need to take back control of the construction industry. The likes of robotics and off-site manufacturing have never been taken as seriously as they should, but they could well prove the difference. So, too, could training. Working with schools and colleges is one way of taking control but this takes time. In the short term retraining and turning to the unemployed and underemployed could be a significant benefit to an industry under significant pressure.”

Parliament faces construction skills gap

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Westminster

The Houses of Parliament in London are falling down and in need of what will be a multi-billion restoration project. As a result, Members of Parliament, peers and civil servants are facing a skills gap literally on their crumbling doorstep.

Construction News reported last week (Specialist skills shortage poses ‘risk’ to £4bn Parliament restoration [£]) that Parliament’s Joint Committee on the Palace of Westminster had warned that a lack of specialist skills across the sector could hamper the parliamentary restoration programme. In a report (Restoration and Renewal of the Palace of Westminster – available here), the committee devoted a section (“Managing the supply chain“) of Chapter 6 to detailed discussion of the need for specialist construction skills.

The committee received evidence from construction industry organisations including the RIBA, RICS and CIBSE, all of whom pointed out the need to start investing at the earliest possible opportunity in the skills that will be needed to deliver the Westminster restoration and renewal (R&R) programme. It also highlighted that most of these skills tend to be found the heritage and conservation sectors, where the vast majority of firms are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

  • The RIBA told the committee a “great skills shortage issue resulting from declining investment into the conservation sector and a large pipeline of works in the UK that would divert resources from the R&R Programme.” But even without this pipeline of expected works, there might still be insufficient skills available in the market to tackle the scale of the challenge entailed in the R&R Programme – even though it’s expected to start no sooner than 2023.
  • RICS suggested the R&R programme might become an “exemplar project” demonstrating how training and the sustainability of skills could be built into large programmes.
  • CIBSE also suggested that, rather than viewing the supply and capacity as a challenge, the R&R programme provided a unique opportunity to develop a new generation of skilled heritage workers, through apprenticeships and other career development activity, and also to bring a significant number of young women into the sector (diversity being an ongoing issue – post).

The committee was clearly under no illusion of the need to start engaging with supply chains, and also recognised that the project provided opportunities not only to engage with SMEs, but to spread the work well beyond London and the south-east of England (in much the same way that Crossrail has involved companies the length and breadth of the UK), and to develop a strategy for training and creating apprenticeships that would leave a legacy of skills and experience.

In short, the Westminster project, is, to use the RIBA’s words, “an ideal opportunity for educating and training the next generation in the skills needed to maintain, repair and enhance the historic buildings and to be an ongoing exemplar project for those skills and craftsmanship.” With SkillsPlanner’s focus on skills in London and the southeast, we will be watching for any mobilisation with respect to this project with interest.

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.

Skills shortages hitting workmanship

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Scape report clip

Skills shortages are wrecking the quality of workmanship on construction projects, says a supply chain survey undertaken by Scape Group (see also report by Construction Enquirer).

Earlier this summer, Scape surveyed over 150 senior managers at public sector organisations across local and central government, along with a range of suppliers and subcontractors delivering built environment services. These included contractors who provide construction and civil engineering services, consultancies who support the public sector and facilities management providers. This survey sought the opinion of tiers 1, 2 and 3 of the public sector supply chain. Scape asked questions about the tendering process and bid opportunities, the stability of the supply chain, supply chain management, the skills shortage and an investigation into the sector’s reliance on public projects.

The resulting Sustainability in the Supply Chain report (available here) found 58% of contractors and suppliers cited shortages as negatively impacting the quality of their workmanship. The problem is worse in the public sector with 85% of managers seeing the quality of their built environment projects negatively affected by skills shortages.

Lack of labour is also busting budgets with 80% of public sector respondents and just under 40% of contractors and consultants blaming skills shortages for cost rises.

Mark Robinson, Scape Group Chief Executive, said:

“Our research has shown that the skills shortage is at breaking point, not only severely impacting the quality of what we are building but also our ability to build it on budget. While there is a mountain to climb to overcome this challenge, basic recommendations can be put in place to ease the burden, for example, 19% of contractors and subcontractors still do not have an apprenticeship scheme.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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….