Construction Sector Still Needs Skilled Tradesmen

With green blankets covering the buildings and cranes slicing through skylines serving as a constant reminder of Britain's building boom of the last few years, it can be difficult to imagine that the commercial building industry is affected by the economic crisis. The fact that the industry is not yet cutting back - while other industries are - seems to indicate the explosion of new construction works have not come to an end. The problem, it seems, is a lack of high quality skilled workers to fill the demands of construction companies.

The shortage of skilled construction workers is most noticeable when examining last year's figures. 13,000 building projects were launched in 2007, and approximately 87,600 labourers were required to support these projects.  The expertise deficiency is therefore widespread, both in the trade and non-trade. The highest annual requirements of the general trade are the electrical trade and wood trade, and there is also a high demand for building specialists and brick layers. The biggest requirements among non-trades include business processing managers, construction managers, professional and technical staff, architects, and office-based IT-recruits.

These deficiencies are largely due to three reasons: 1) the impact of the building boom, 2) the decrease in the number of East Europeans in the trade; 3) recruiters' misconceptions of what construction work entails.

The first reason is quite self-evident and has already been discussed previously - the higher the project demands are, the more individuals need to be hired to do the jobs.

As many of the highly-skilled workers in the British trade were often of Polish origin, the impact of the construction boom in Poland is keeping a lot of Poles at home, which is a massive loss for British construction companies.

The third reason why Britain is plagued by a labour shortage is because of the misconceptions that recruiters have about construction work. A lot of job hunters perceive the job as being limited to the construction site - while in fact; many positions are often office-based or managerial.

Various steps have been taken to diminish the gap in the trade. One of the ways companies do this is by getting women and various ethnic groups to consider a career in construction - not just white males with maths qualifications. The National Association of Women in Construction, for example, is looking outside the traditional recruitment pools, trying to target groups with a larger range of skills and work approaches. This creates a different work atmosphere, introduces fresh ideas into the industry, and cultivates diversity in the workplace. 

A way of increasing the number of graduates in the construction trade is by getting children interested at a young age, as the Sustainable Employment Legacy Forum and Inspire Scholarships programs have done. They not only organise trips for children to visit construction sites, but they also offer student funds, apprenticeships, and training courses to people in the poorer outskirts of London, providing younger generations with great initiatives to join the industry.

Another important initiative to acquire more employees is to change the ways in which the building industry is viewed. By getting communities to realize that construction is about so much more than just hard hats and light-reflecting mesh jackets, more recruits might start believing construction work is a suitable career.

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This page has been written with contributions from experienced plumbers from Essex and plumbers from Clapham. Several of the company's Gas Safe engineers from Buckinghamshire have worked on similar issues as well as some of our plumbing and heating engineers from Kilburn and our Hammersmith heating engineers.

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