Tag Archives: SkillsPlanner

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.

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.

Can Sadiq Khan help London’s skills shortage?

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SadiqKhanmanifestoimage

As a collaborative R&D project focused, initially, on the construction skills challenges of London and the southeast, our SkillsPlanner team has learned a lot about the need for joined-up thinking in and around the capital. We have also watched the London Mayoral and Greater London Assembly elections with considerable interest. Now that the votes have been cast, we hope Sadiq Khan, his GLA colleagues, and his proposed “Skills for Londoners” Task Force will make a profound difference in how we deliver future skills to support new housing and infrastructure over the next five years – and beyond.

As the CIOB’s CEO Chris Blythe recently remarked, the lack of a construction skills pipeline could damage the London Mayor’s housing and infrastructure plans. But it’s not just about our immediate skills shortages.

We also need to show young people that they can enjoy a long, exciting and rewarding career while they help deliver our built assets. And as London grows and technologies change, our people also need to know they can retrain, gain new knowledge and skills, and continue to contribute to the London construction economy.

Our ambitions seem well aligned with Mr Khan’s manifesto commitments:

  • to “develop a city-wide, strategic approach to skills…”
  • to “map the skills gap”
  • to “create a pipeline of skilled London workers”, and
  • to “close the gap between our … housing targets and the need for more skilled construction workers in London.”

To do this, in our view, high quality information – data – will be vital. If we can clearly forecast future skills needs and match London organisations’ ability to deliver, we can reassure both workers and employers – and London policy-makers. I hope Sadiq Khan encourages more pan-London data-sharing, including via SkillsPlanner, to help us make construction better connected and more resilient.

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.

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….

Let’s share more data on skills and diversity

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CIC report #AB4C cover

The Construction Industry Council, the representative forum for professional bodies, research organisations and specialist business associations in the UK construction industry, has just published its latest diversity data benchmarking report. A Blueprint for Change (download here) gives insights into the industry’s progress since the first CIC Diversity Panel report was published in 2009, ahead of the introduction of the 2010 Equality Act.

The report indicates that:

  • there has been a 1% increase in the number of female professionals in the construction workforce (the industry professions remain male-dominated, with men making up 85.9%)
  • the gender mix in industry varies with age with a notable increase in females aged 25 and under
  • more people are due to retire than are joining the industry at a young age
  • only two of the participating institutions gather data on sexual orientation
  • the religious profile of the industry remains the same as in 2009
  • among those who choose to disclose ethnicity, the BAME population is 11.3% of the industry
  • less than 5% of the industry declare disability
  • consultancy is outperforming other areas of industry in attracting women and people from BAME
    background.

Gender mix by age

Data challenges

The report’s findings were collated from data supplied by a number of CIC member institutions. Sample sizes varied for each category because of the protected characteristics on which data is held, the classifications of some of those protected characteristics, and the varying disclosure rates. CIC Project Manager, Danna Walker, said:

“In order to achieve a truly reflective benchmark for industry we need everyone to agree to collect the same categories of information, and for more institutions to get involved and collaborate. If we can’t measure it, we can’t manage it and improve!”

A Blueprint for Change features case studies demonstrating pockets of activity to support industry practitioners (one is SkillsPlanner partner Thames Tideway’s Women Returners Programme – mentioned in a previous post Catch them when they’re older) and calls on industry to undertake three major actions:

  • address the needs of a multi-generational workforce, particularly in terms of retention, and focus efforts on attracting new entrants and building on the successes of attracting a more diverse millennial cohort (just today, Construction News commented: “New blood is what is needed – not just young people but a more diverse workforce, including those of working age who have never worked in construction before”).
  • provide greater support and celebrate inclusive activities and in particular those led by practitioners who are creating positive impact
  • collaboration from the institutions to collect a wider range of data and for greater participation in the project (the next CIC Diversity Panel report will be published in 2018).
SkillsPlanner can help

We would certainly support each of these objectives. Addressing each one briefly:

  • A key ambition of the SkillsPlanner project is to improve understanding of diversity within the construction industry and training provision, and we are already collaborating with several industry bodies to collect data about industry skills supply and demand and about relevant demographics.
  • As a project focused on creation of a data-powered approach, the SkillsPlanner team can provide expertise on data collation, interpretation and visualisation, and could provide real-time evidence of the impacts made by participating practitioners.
  • And collaboration is at the core of the project’s aim to deliver a real-time picture of the skills landscape, with some CIC member institutions already contributing to the project, alongside central and local government, industry and training providers.

We have written to Bridget Bartlett, chair of the CIC Diversity Panel, to explore if we can help.