Bridget Bartlett: Let’s open our eyes and expand our workforce

Ask any senior construction manager what keeps them awake at night and a shortage of skilled staff will be near the top of their worry list. However, there is a whole pool of potential talent out there that the industry is blind to.

When only 11% of the construction workforce is female, and only 3% are black or minority ethnic (BME), the industry is still seen as male, pale and macho. There is also a huge challenge in engaging with our one million 16-to-24-year-olds who are not in education, employment or training (NEETs).

In February, the CIOB and CITB supported a cross-party parliamentary inquiry which sought to find how the construction industry can secure training and work for the large number of NEETs in the UK. The resulting report, No More Lost Generations, found that there is no silver bullet to the skills crisis.

Firstly, we need to improve understanding in schools of the range of career opportunities available. Government intervention over the last two decades has hampered the quality of careers advice. Indeed the abolishment of the national Connexions service in 2012 led to the responsibility being placed on schools to deliver independent career guidance for year 9–11 pupils. Many teachers, despite their best intentions, lack the necessary expertise and resources to deliver this advice.

I applaud the UKCG’s Born to Build campaign and the ICE’s Happy Engineers social media hit video for helping to inspire young people. We need to support schools, teachers and students to fully appreciate our industry’s capacity for providing well-paid, well-structured careers, with professional status and social mobility built in.

It must be noted that innovative technologies are transforming the construction industry. Employers increasingly recognise the need to recruit a new breed of worker, strong in digital and data management skills and able to collaborate across several technical disciplines. This rapidly modernising image presents an opportunity to attract a more diverse workforce. But crucially, it also requires the right employer engagement, which we will delve into at our Inspiring the Future of Construction (inspiring.ciob.org) conference in November.

If we want to end the national scandal, and avoid creating more “lost generations,” we need to embrace developing our next workforce.