Mark Farmer is the founder of Cast Consultancy and the author of the independent Department for Education review on construction skills
One of the central conclusions I arrived at in writing the recent Industry Training Board review, Transforming the Construction Workforce, is that the solutions to the industry’s future capacity problems lie not just in increasing headcount but also in ensuring we get more from the finite labour resources we already have.
“Once in the industry and holding a CSCS card, the imperative to maintain and improve an individual worker’s skills all too often simply does not exist”
We know we have an ageing workforce so there is without doubt a need to urgently backfill leavers. Most people see this as an attraction problem. I am of the opinion, however, that most kids entering onsite trades, where we have the biggest shortages, are predisposed towards construction for a variety of reasons other than having been influenced by deliberate industry attraction measures, so we need to think again about how we drive true additionality.
Reforming career pathways
We can, in reality, have a much bigger impact on entrant numbers by reforming career entry pathways. We need increased absorption into the industry from the post-16 talent pool who are already looking at a construction career. Presently we are losing far too many of this cohort, in large part due to the inability to place them in employed trainee positions. Clearly having a stable pipeline is the overarching driver for more confidence to employ but we can also help stem entry leakage by improving the skills system.
That is why it was pleasing to see that last week the Department for Education announce measures to accelerate apprenticeship pathways and to look again at academic requirements for English and maths. This will help boost the available resource pool and also improve early work readiness, if these new courses are deployed with high-quality training provision.
Last year the government announced an National House Building Council-led national roll out of multi-skills training hubs. This is one of the ways new training pathways can be deployed on the ground and at scale. I am very pleased to be chairing the steering group for this important initiative, working with the housebuilding sector to boost its production capacity.
Improving workforce productivity
However, there is an even bigger lever to pull on industry capacity which is too often overlooked: the competence and capability of the standing workforce. This debate is emotive and is hugely complicated by the flexible labour model the industry uses, with a large self-employed component. Once in the industry and holding a CSCS card, the imperative to maintain and improve an individual worker’s skills all too often simply does not exist. Improving average competency across the whole workforce can be a route to not only improved quality of output but also overall productivity.
The biggest influencers for productivity improvement are clients, designers, procurers and constructors. If a job is designed, procured and planned deliberately for productivity, then we change the game. However, we have to accept that the chance of that happening in short order across the industry is remote.
Implementing incremental gains
So, what can we do more urgently and at site level to realise incremental gains? A shallow and wide approach is needed, supported by funding from the Construction Industry Training Board. And it has to be led by simple, practical things that both employed and self-employed workers are motivated to engage with, spanning behaviours, hard skills and knowledge.
There is likely to be disproportionate benefit in training the ‘black hat’ supervisor cohort first. Reducing things like standing time and rework have to be priorities, but how do we drive this in a massively fragmented workforce that often does not have personal accountability for a good outcome?
That is where the idea of a compliance-led culture and a fraud-proof digital skills passport for the whole workforce comes in. We need procurement, funding, insurance and regulation to all work together to create an effective barrier to the ability to work on a construction site. This in turn needs active policing to allow improved competence to drive improved productivity. The precedents for such an approach already exist in the energy sector through the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board-supported Connected Competence scheme.
Some tough conversations lie ahead as to whether the industry has the courage to think boldly about upskilling and reskilling and how it can safeguard the quality, not just the quantity, of its future workforce.
