The construction industry has long faced a shortage of the key skills required to design and construct our built environment, and with the sector faced with the most ambitious target since the post-war era, plugging this resource gap is more important than ever.
Baily Garner’s Managing Partner Bradley Webster chaired a discussion at UK Construction Week with a diverse panel of industry professionals brought together to address the question of how we solve the skills gap, whether through targeted recruitment strategies, advanced technology, or a mix of both.
Below are some of the key themes that came out of the discussion:
A resource or tech challenge?
Bradley opened the discussion by asking the panel which side of the equation we should be investing in more heavily right now. The answers presented a mixed outlook depending on the speaker’s area of operation in the market, and there was a consistent theme that advanced technology like AI wasn’t a replacement for skilled workers, but the use of it would become a new normal for them in the future.
Nick Maclean, President Elect, RICS: “There’s more work, broadly, than there are people to do it at the moment, and we have two choices, we either upskill the workforce that we have at the moment, or we bring more people into the country through immigration… Those people who are facing industrial decline in some areas, hydrocarbons, for instance, in the North East of Scotland. That’s a good skills pool of people who’ve got very significant experience and we need to bring them back into a meaningful job for them and for the country.”
Ben Raybould, Director, Turner & Townsend: “I don’t think there’s a trade off between one and the other. We need to take everybody on a journey and actually make people not necessarily just digitally aware, but digitally confident. We have a huge journey ahead of us to transform the industry and upskill individuals and bring new talent into the industry, and technology is going to be a massive part of that.”
Amber Kennard, Partner, Human Capital, Government and Public Services, Deloitte: “We’ve got an ageing workforce and we need to bring young people into it. One of the most exciting things is AI and innovation, and there’s huge scope for really mentoring the next generation and setting up new ways of learning that tap into that excitement and the skills of young people. This will help change the image of the industry and in turn bring in new people. One of the things we’re doing through the new hospital programme is looking at how we can build new workforces across the country and new capabilities in building. The only way we’re going to get people into construction and the NHS, two areas which are challenging, is by asking ourselves, if we were leaving school at 16 or 18, what would we want to see? We’d want to see great role models and opportunities for learning.”
David Flynn, Co-founder, Kope: “The younger someone is in relation to their education and interaction with the construction industry, the less impressive they find the technology we use. It just becomes par for the course. We’re getting to a point where it’s probably not going to be anyone here who’s solving these issues, it’s going to be that next wave that comes through, because they just see it as what they do. Realistically, the technology is not necessarily going to solve things that are happening on site, it’s going to solve things that are happening in consultancies and boardrooms.”
How do we attract new talent?
A common thread running throughout the discussion was how we address the skills shortage by attracting new talent, and there was broad agreement among the panel that we don’t do a great job as an industry at showcasing our positive impact. Viewpoints on how we improve in this area ranged from emphasising different areas within our sector in which young people would be excited to make an impact, to the value of role models and using PR to show how our industry can transform people’s lives.
Nick Maclean: “We need to be better at selling our industry. I talk to the young people coming out of their exams about what they care about in a career and hear those same themes of diversity and sustainability. Isn’t that the heart of construction? We have an opportunity within our business to fundamentally change the way the world is ‘built’ and therefore can appeal to all of the things young people care about at the moment.”
Amber Kennard: “When I started my career as a surgeon many decades ago there were very few women doing it, and one of the things they lacked was role models. In health, now, 75% of the workforce in the NHS are women, and a lot of that has been because they’ve had strong role models over the course of the last 30 years… What’s interesting about the construction industry is that it doesn’t have that kind of social media footprint where people in their late teens and early 20s are looking at it. We’ve got to reposition ourselves. There’s a piece of PR and branding that needs to think about how we’re viewed by those that are thinking about their careers and the future. For me, it’s a combination of those strong role models and repositioning the industry as a really exciting place to be.”
Ben Raybould: “What we definitely don’t talk enough about is how our industry and what we do is transformational. It’s transforming lives. Amber referred to the new hospital programme, which is something I’m working on as well, and the hook for me there is that we’re transforming lives at the very end-user level of those projects, which is patients. That to me is highly attractive and a great motivator, and it needs to be part of the discussion when we’re attracting new talent into the industry.”
How should we be using technology?
Bradley shifted the focus to technology’s potential to make us more efficient and productive, asking the panel where they believed it could make the greatest impact. He also asked what the best approach was to implementing technology, and how it might help the industry with addressing the skills gap.
Ben Raybould: “Start with decisions and not technology. The biggest lesson I’ve learnt on this journey is without truly understanding the heat map of what people are doing, we’re really going to struggle to demonstrate value… A lot of the time when I speak to my colleagues in the digital team there’s a feeling that we’re not moving quick enough and there’s a lack of innovation. My response to them is, when was the last time you were on a construction site? When you think about the use case at that level, you realise the problem isn’t that Aconex isn’t working properly, it’s actually that the drawing in the hand of the engineer is 10 revisions old, because they’ve come to love that drawing. That’s the real issue that’s happening on sites, and AI isn’t going to solve that problem. It’s really important we remind our colleagues and the industry that we need to be out on site to see these things. AI has a role to play, but it’s not going to have an impact everywhere.”
David Flynn: “I’m coming at it from a tech point of view but I come back to Ben’s point about what are we doing it for? What are we trying to achieve? We do a lot of things with AI that are pointless or superfluous. Where it really becomes important and where all of our careers are going to shift, is that moment where we realise, this is the purpose behind what I’m trying to achieve, and this is what the person on the other side of the table needs from me. When it comes to the skills side, people coming into the industry just need to understand why they’re doing what they do. I’m not just building a hospital, I’m building a place for patients to be treated. It’s not just a building, it’s an activity and a space for things to happen. That sort of thinking really changes the questions you’re asking an AI model.”
Nick Maclean: “I would say to those people who are afraid of AI taking away jobs: We’ve been here before at the commencement of the industrial revolution, when the population of the country was one third of what it is now. There was devastation potentially on the horizon, but it didn’t materialise. We need to use technology and sophisticated software to re-educate people, and that will lead to more efficiencies going forward. People and technology are inextricably linked. It’s all about education.”