Matt Voyce is executive director of construction at Quintain
The construction industry needs more than a quarter of a million extra workers by 2026. Between 1991 and 2011 the Office for National Statistics tracked a 13 per cent increase in the number of UK construction workers aged 45 and over. According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, by 2022 1.2 million workers were aged over 65.
“The construction industry must be prepared to actively engage young people”
Older workers are retiring from a physically demanding but highly skilled profession, and without sufficient new talent poised to take their place, these skills are vanishing. This ageing workforce, coupled with a lack of interest from younger generations, is triggering a severe skills shortage in the construction industry.
Changing the narrative
To counteract this shortage, we need to position a career in construction as a viable and attractive path, and this means a drastic change in narrative. The misconceptions around building work – that it’s poorly paid, dirty, and dull – must be dispelled. What’s more, this innovative sector can mean working offsite in ever more tech-focused roles, for example working with AI, virtual reality or drones.
Providing the sector with the new lifeblood it needs will first require educating prospective entrants on the opportunities within it, whether this means using social media to inspire young people around the construction industry or visiting schools to engage directly with children. Staff could be given volunteering days every year so they can attend schools or job fairs, or help young people with their CVs or interview preparation.
Offering funding and opportunities to local primary schools that enable teachers to introduce young people to the wide, varied and much in demand careers in construction, could also make a huge difference.
In addition to educating young people, construction opportunities need to be primed for school leavers. Increasingly, construction companies are using apprenticeships to entice prospective students with the promise of skills and opportunities alongside avoiding student debt. Apprenticeships enable trainees to learn on the job, equipping them with practical skills and allowing them to gain nationally recognised qualifications, such as City & Guilds for onsite trades and BA and BSc degrees for office-based roles.
Section 106 agreements continue to be crucial in ensuring that developers nurture their surrounding communities, including encouraging organisations to plant learning opportunities in the local area. But these should be viewed as the bare minimum, with developers and companies that can do more, doing more.
Like-minded developers and contractors need to be able to connect in order to facilitate discussions, sharing best practice around fostering young talent in the sector. By engaging with other local developers and contractors, we can tune in to the current challenges of the sector, identifying exactly where local labour needs lie.
The collective knowledge gained from working groups can also help local educational institutions to develop their course curriculums to meet current and future demands within the sector, allowing their students to be better prepared for the job opportunities immediately available.
By working closely with local developers and contractors, the local authority, and educational institutions, developers can gain an awareness of their local sector’s immediate needs and ensure these are filled.
The construction industry must be prepared to actively engage young people, redefining what it is to work in construction, to ensure the future fortification of this sector. Reshaping the narrative around construction as a career, providing attractive opportunities to younger generations, and working together to understand the specific challenges of the local construction pipeline are imperative to ensuring our construction industry can thrive.
