A construction boom depends on more than technical skills

The labor market is in the midst of a critical transformation towards sustainable economic growth and productivity. Labor’s industrial strategy and its review of assessment and curriculum both highlight the importance of skills in delivering its missions for government, but what skills? And how?

Among the many sectors facing critical skills shortages in the workforce and growing skills shortageconstruction and infrastructure play a particularly crucial role in the central initiative to “to build Britain again‘.

The Federation of Master Builders reports that we need more than 240,000 construction workers over the next four years to meet demand. This severe shortage of skilled workers places an increasing burden on economic growth goals and national projects.

But focusing on technical skills will not be enough.

What skills?

Essential skills such as problem solving, teamwork and communication are equally important. In fact, people with higher levels of essential skills experience improved social mobility, employment, earnings, and greater job and life satisfaction.

It also works as a platform for developing other skills such as literacy and numeracy as well as technical skills. To overlook them is to overlook a key driver of growth and productivity, with an estimated cost in 2022 of £22.2 billion.

We know that those from more disadvantaged backgrounds tend to have fewer opportunities to acquire and demonstrate essential skills, so they are as important for social mobility as they are for economic growth.

Increasing productivity involves employers playing their part to develop essential skills in the workforce.

But how? Here are two companies that demonstrate the key elements of a successful approach.

Staff development

Amey, an infrastructure company, has started using the Skills Builder Partnership The universal framework in its apprenticeship and graduate program in 2022.

A series of ten workshops initially supported employees to understand essential skills, identify their strengths and areas for development using the framework and set actionable goals for improvement.

Since then, Amey has trained line managers from across the business to support their teams, enabling them to mentor apprentices and graduates in essential skills. It also integrated reflective practice into formal review processes.

The program has received overwhelmingly positive feedback and staff report significant progress in developing essential skills.

Prioritizing problem solving, collaboration and communication in a supportive environment enables Amey to address immediate skills gaps and increase the adaptability and resilience of the workforce.

Recruitment processes

At Morgan Sindall Infrastructure, using the framework to recruit for early career roles has broadened the talent pool and improved the quality of candidate applications.

As a first step, we worked with the company to identify the key skills required for success in various roles, particularly apprenticeships. We then supported them to reformulate the requirements using the framework to clearly articulate the essential skills desired.

With job descriptions now appealing to a wider talent pool, Morgan Sindall Infrastructure then used the framework throughout the recruitment process to inform group exercises, presentations and interview questions, ensuring a consistent approach to assessment, benchmarking and feedback candidates.

Since incorporating the essential skills into their recruitment processes, the organization has seen a 170% increase in candidates deemed suitable for roles, as well as greater candidate diversity.

Embedding essential skills is therefore not only transformative for recruitment, but also unlocks the untapped potential of a large number of previously excluded potential recruits.

Long term investment

The challenge of skills shortages in these industries cannot be solved overnight, and the Government’s commitment to increasing the UK’s construction and infrastructure capacity can only be achieved if we have the workforce to support it.

To truly unlock the potential of the construction and infrastructure sectors to drive the national economic recovery, both government and employers need to invest in essential skills.

Employers are adopting the Universal Framework in staff development, supporting their adaptability in an evolving economy. They also use it to recruit workers with the skills they need, reaping the benefits of a wider talent pool.

As far as the government is concerned, it must not lose sight of what has often been disparagingly called in education ‘soft skills’. They are, in fact, essential, and young people should develop them long before they enter the workplace.

If we want to ensure that infrastructure projects are delivered on time and to the highest standards, and if we want to put the country on the path to long-term prosperity, essential skills are… well… essential.