Construction Skills: Why We Need to Build Careers, Not Just Jobs

I’ve run a large regional construction group for more than 20 years, and I now chair a range of family businesses and industry groups across the construction and solar sectors. I’ve also been a Governor of an FE construction college for nearly ten years, so I’ve seen the skills question from both sides of the table.

There are three questions I keep coming back to on construction skills. Why should construction and green businesses engage with colleges and education? What skills do we actually need? And how do we make the partnership between employers and educators work? Answer all three neatly and world peace is surely next on the list.

I’m writing unashamedly as a construction employer. Employers are the organisations being asked to deliver the UK’s infrastructure, to hire competent people, often at their own commercial risk, and to keep our society functioning. I’m also an unashamed capitalist. I understand that I have to provide a service to get paid, that the quality of that service influences how much I’m paid, and that skills and expertise are subject to supply and demand like anything else.

That last point explains most of what I believe about the relationship between education and employment.

Why does the construction skills system keep falling out of balance?

The construction skills shortage persists because three groups (employers, educators and students) each depend on the others, and all three need to be in balance for the system to work. Look at it from each angle:

• For a contractor, there is demand for my services that I can choose to meet, and a supply of skills coming from schools, colleges and universities.
• For a college, there is a supply of educators and students that has to respond to demand from employers.
• For a student, there is demand from industry for people to build careers, and a supply of educators who can make that a reality.

All three need to sit in equilibrium. The problem is that each group is now exposed to pressures it was never designed to cope with. The system needs a steady state to operate effectively, and it hasn’t had one for many years. Some would argue the pace of change and the level of uncertainty are only increasing.

Why should construction and green businesses engage with colleges?

Employers need to be confident they’ll have the work before they recruit and train. It’s a basic rule of business: without cash coming in, there’s little to invest in people or competence. Those of us who run businesses understand this instinctively. Colleges and students sometimes need reminding.

When I ran a regional construction company, we never really knew what work would come through the door, so my managers were very reluctant to recruit until they had a job in hand. I used to point out two things. First, we’d been around for 150 years and would probably outlast their careers, so we were bound to need people at some stage. Second, if they only recruited when they got busy, they were bringing people on at the worst possible moment, when everyone was too stretched to show a new starter the ropes over the months it takes to do properly.

Recruitment and training is a confidence trick. If businesses are confident, they plan for the future.

So how confident should we be? Great Britain’s new construction work grew from roughly £75bn in 2010 to a record of around £140bn in 2024. Take Hertfordshire as an example: the value of work roughly doubled over the same period, from around £5bn to nearly £10bn. The renewables sector alone is forecast at more than £40bn a year nationally, of which £2.5bn to £3bn could be delivered in Hertfordshire. Spread across the county’s 14,600 construction businesses, that is a very reasonable chunk of turnover.

Part of the job for politicians and councils is to communicate that pipeline clearly and to find out how businesses can prepare to deliver it.

A corporate risk register belongs in every business

I’m not suggesting that SMEs, for whom life is genuinely tough, should load up on staff in the hope that work walks through the door. I’m suggesting they assess what they need, how the industry is changing, and what their customers (and their customers’ customers) are going to expect.

One tool we consistently fail to use is the corporate risk register. We’re very good at assessing project risks for our teams. We’re very poor at applying the same discipline to our companies. A good corporate risk register, whatever the size of the business, should include your approach to skills and competence. Skills take time to acquire and embed in your culture, so forward planning isn’t optional.

Will AI and robotics replace construction jobs?

I hear the argument that there’s no point recruiting because AI is going to take all our jobs. Two experiences tell me otherwise.

The first goes back to the mid-1980s, when I was lucky enough to study at one of the world’s best engineering universities. In my final year we were told, with a straight face, that by 2020 a third of our working day would become leisure time as mechanisation took over, and that our expertise would be valued all the more highly. I can say with confidence that I have never worked harder.

The second is more recent. I chair a group of businesses working to introduce humanoid robots into construction. It includes some of the industry’s largest companies, and not one person in that cooperative believes these machines will replace a single worker. The industry is short of skills, and it works in some unpleasant places. Humanoids will support people, extending what they can do and how efficiently they do it.

That doesn’t mean the world isn’t changing. It is, and businesses have to change with it. But construction skills are eminently transferable, and our people are capable of picking up new ones. In my view, the world of work will be shaped by AI and by the greening of our industry, and those are the skills businesses should be learning about now.

Are green jobs different from construction jobs?

Frankly, I don’t find the term “green job” very helpful as an employer, other than perhaps as a way of attracting new talent. Most roles in our sector apply equally to renewable and traditional projects. The core competencies don’t change, though there may be additional knowledge an individual should have.

Carbon literacy training is the clearest example, and I think every member of staff should have it. The built environment influences around 40% of the UK’s carbon emissions, and we will be called to account for that.

What is driving change in construction skills?

Three shifts stand out to me, and together they point to a better way for education and employment to work together.

1. The focus is moving from jobs to careers

A focus on jobs makes for good political soundbites. You could trace it back to Yosser Hughes pleading for work in Boys from the Black Stuff in 1982. But we now have to recognise that we all work within a system, and both businesses and recruits are looking for long-term careers. The cost and disruption of recruitment is palpable. Educators should be supporting careers, not just filling jobs.

Part of the reason is that construction now carries a statutory duty of competence. Competence isn’t a handful of qualifications. It’s something educators understand well: skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours. That duty encourages employers to hold on to their people and make sure they build up the competence they need. It’s underpinned by legislation, and it’s increasingly a condition of getting insurance and of entering many supply chains.

My challenge to educators is this: how can you contribute to competence across a whole working life?

2. Clients now expect carbon and sustainability reporting

Delivering construction well is now taken as read. On top of that, we’re increasingly asked to report on carbon, sustainability and tighter regulation, and the long supply chains in our industry make that genuinely difficult without systems thinking.

The NHS is a good example. Since April 2024 it has required a carbon reduction plan for all new procurements, applied proportionately by contract size, and the requirements tighten again from April 2027. If it succeeds in driving down embodied carbon, that kind of reporting could spread right across the sector. Even if you’re not in an NHS supply chain today, it makes sense to understand how it works.

Follow that through and the self-employed bricklayer may soon need to report the carbon emissions of a specific project. How will educators prepare them for that?

3. The market is shifting from new build to repair and reuse

I expect much more of our work to move from new build to repair and rework, using buildings and materials that fit a circular economy. What skills will people need to thrive in that environment? And how will colleges adapt their training to match?

The line between management and trades is blurring

Put these pressures together and the traditional line between management and the trades starts to disappear. That matters enormously in construction, where around 95% of businesses employ fewer than ten people. Everyone needs to understand the consequences of their actions within the wider system of project delivery. You can’t be that bricklayer if you don’t understand what happens when the mortar is missed from a perp end.

What do educators and businesses need to recognise?

Education is also a system, and businesses find it hard to influence. We’re expected to employ the product of 14-plus years of education, and we worry that FE and HE work in silos with little influence over the basic skills of the students they take in. Businesses would love to take life skills for granted, because those matter far more than the technical skills learned in the final three years.

Construction is unusual. We are mostly small businesses, they do the majority of the training, and they sit within extraordinarily long supply chains. Their ability to flex is very limited, and they need help at every level to make recruitment as easy as possible.

Fragmentation is the enemy. That’s as true for educators as for businesses. The longer the supply chain and the more organisations involved, the harder it is to reach a clean, efficient outcome. The Hertfordshire Local Skills Improvement Plan (LSIP) is a real step forward, and I can see the ambition for joined-up thinking. I’d urge everyone involved to tackle the intractable problems, such as maths and English attainment, and to look hard at why shortages persist in the county despite all this work.

My suspicion is that businesses simply don’t have the confidence to invest right now. They can see the cost of recruitment, not the value. I also suspect it’s just too complicated to get what they need relative to the effort involved.

Educators need to understand the role skills play inside a business, and every business is different. Training and recruitment have to improve our ability to earn a living and make a profit, whether that’s to win a particular project or to make the business more resilient overall. That’s why there’s such a focus on productivity, and why taking on unproductive new recruits is such a challenge.

How do we make the partnership between employers and educators work?

Train the leaders first

There are between 2.2 and 3 million people working in UK construction, compared with an annual new student cohort of under 750,000. Unless we train the leaders, who are usually the directors of their own businesses, change will be very difficult. Directors are generally the last people in any business to receive training, yet they’re the ones who need the tools to lead through a period of great change.

Look at sport to see how badly we’ve got senior leader training wrong. Every top athlete has a team of coaches and specialists working together to improve their performance. In business, leaders get to the top because they’re good, and then they’re expected to know everything. I’m not suggesting every director needs five coaches, but targeted support for business leadership could unlock a much broader range of benefits.

This is also where the corporate risk register comes back in. We all use project risk registers; they’re effectively a statutory requirement. Extending that discipline to the business itself, with competence written into it, encourages longer-term thinking and connects a company’s capability to likely changes in its market. It supports two of the actions in the government’s Construction Jobs Plan, strategic planning and embedding competence, and it gives educators the evidence they need to plan their resources.

Make lifelong learning the norm

Many of us focus on continuous improvement in our businesses. Far fewer focus on continuous improvement in our people. Yet we face unprecedented change in processes, materials, information management and society itself.

Neither businesses nor regions can afford for workers to become stranded assets: people who used to be very good at one thing but can’t cope with what comes next. Competence is a journey, never a destination, and continuous education for employed staff deserves far more attention.

Work through the trade bodies

Every trade body in construction is, or should be, interested in the competence of its members. Colleges need strong relationships with these organisations, because they often have excellent access to the very SMEs that are so hard to reach. By working with them, I hope colleges can uncover the real reasons SME engagement is so difficult. There are plenty of good ideas in the LSIP, but they will only be effective if the blockages are addressed.

What can solar, retrofit and heritage teach us about construction skills?

Solar. Sector-based Work Academy Programmes have been used very effectively, but they’re the exception rather than the rule. Electrical and roofing apprenticeships have been adapted to include some solar training, and there’s a clear opportunity for colleges to provide foundational training to the sector.

Retrofit. This is a challenging market because it’s so interconnected. In my view, it needs experienced operatives with deep knowledge of their trade and craft to advise on the whole system, and the best way to get there is through CPD for people who already have that experience.

Heritage. It may seem an unusual one to highlight, but more heritage work is coming, and the skills learned there transfer well and are protected from automation.

Restoring the equilibrium

Which brings me back to equilibrium. The system only works effectively when it’s in balance, and restoring that balance is a job for all of us, whether we sit in construction or in education. My asks are simple:

• Focus on careers, not jobs, and start by supporting businesses. No businesses means no employers to recruit. Train directors and owners in how to run a business and manage risks and opportunities at a corporate level.
• Help the nearly three million people already in work. The world is changing, and existing staff need training to stay employed and avoid stranded asset syndrome. Carbon literacy and the effective use of AI are good places to start. Embedding colleges in this work will also lead to student placements with far more relevant skills.
• Make it simple to work with you, and make sure the life skills we used to take for granted are developed throughout education, not just in the final three years. Without them, businesses take on more risk than they can manage.
• Use the trade bodies. Construction SMEs are poorly equipped to focus on recruitment and training, but their trade bodies are keen to make members resilient and competent. There were 263 of them in construction at the last count, so there are plenty to go at.

And two final thoughts to take away:

1. The greater the competence in your business, the more you can charge, and the better your profits ought to be.
2. It is better to train someone and have them leave than not to train them and have them stay.

Frequently asked questions

What is causing the construction skills shortage in the UK?

The shortage comes from an imbalance between employers, educators and students. Employers hesitate to recruit without confidence in future work, SMEs find education systems complex to engage with, and training often focuses on short-term jobs rather than long-term careers and competence.

What skills will construction workers need for net zero?

Core trade skills remain the foundation. On top of those, workers will increasingly need carbon literacy, an understanding of carbon reporting, digital and AI skills, and the systems thinking required for retrofit, repair and circular economy work.

What is carbon literacy training?

Carbon literacy training helps people understand the carbon impact of their everyday work and how to reduce it. In construction, which influences around 40% of UK emissions, it is a sensible baseline for every member of staff, from directors to site operatives.

What does the duty of competence mean in construction?

Competence in construction means having the right skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours for the work you do. It is now underpinned by legislation and is increasingly required by insurers and clients as a condition of entering supply chains.

Why should a construction business keep a corporate risk register?

A corporate risk register applies the same discipline used on projects to the business as a whole. Including skills and competence in it helps directors plan recruitment and training ahead of demand, rather than reacting when they are already too busy to induct new people properly.

Will AI and robotics replace construction workers?

Not in the view of the industry leaders working on it. Construction is short of skills and often works in difficult environments, so AI and humanoid robots are expected to support people and make them more productive rather than replace them.

About the Author

Author

Mark Wakeford

Chairman · Industry Leader

Mark Wakeford is Chairman of EvoEnergy bringing decades of experience across engineering, construction and renewable energy. He plays a key role in shaping EvoEnergy’s long-term strategy while contributing to the wider development of the UK solar industry, with particular focus on skills, supply chain resilience, industry standards and the transition to net zero.

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