Another week, another skills crisis press release. Amid news from the RICS about the 27,000 viable projects that could be put at risk by the shortage of trained and qualified surveyors, or the 200,000 extra people the CITB believes the industry needs to recruit by 2019, or KPMG arguing that the front-loading of the government project pipeline is forcing contractors to deal with skills shortages earlier than anticipated, it does sometimes seem that the only thing the industry is good at is manufacturing alarmist headlines.
Of course, behind every headline there is a project manager wondering how to resource the next project, or a client wondering if the advice they’re getting comes from A team on top of their game or the under-qualified B team. Skills shortages are real, and impacting employers and projects all around us. As KPMG’s Richard Threlfall has said, informal polls of clients and contractors give clear signals that projects are being delayed.
But let’s not get so mesmerised by the shock-value headlines that we are paralysed into inaction. There are certain practical things the industry could do immediately, and longer-term attitudes it could adopt, to shrink those alarming numbers to a more manageable scale.
A particular choke-point appears to be the shortage of quantity surveyors, and a fall-off in the number studying surveying at university. At the same time, there are plenty of graduates in other subjects treading water in non-career jobs. Industry employers and organisations need to act together to formulate a new employer-sponsored conversion course to bring in new talent.
Then at the other end of the spectrum we have the many hundreds of thousands of people who left the industry during the downturn years. Many will be older people, perhaps not looking for full-time work, but whose skills and operational experience could be extremely valuable when the challenge is simply getting things built. There’s a general cult of youth in the industry, as in society as a whole, that’s at odds with demographics, longer working lives and the fact that construction is a complex discipline where experience counts.
Longer down the age range, there will also be many others who left through redundancy, frustration and insecurity. The Construction Leadership Council has a pilot project to reach out to former construction workers in the housebuilding sector. But given the urgency of the skills problem, why is the project not trying to address construction as a whole?
Finally, if we continually talk about a skills shortage in terms of raw numbers, then we will naturally seek solutions that also depend on increasing the headcount in the industry. But if we talk about the industry’s challenge as a skills and productivity crisis, then we naturally seek solutions that improve processes and efficiency as well as attracting the right talent. It’s a question of perception, and all the surveys and reports risk distracting us from seeking a range of solutions.
Elaine Knutt, editor
