Skills

Sarah Sidey is a director of Randstad’s construction division In the recent interim review into misconduct in the Metropolitan Police, author Baroness Casey identified the need for urgent reform from within the organisation. In a letter to Met commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, she wrote that the public “need to have…

Robert Candy is chief executive at the Scaffolding Association The UK’s scaffolding and access sector, like many other construction trades, has a long-standing skills and labour shortage. This problem extends to other sectors and professions, from hospitality to airline pilots. There are many possible reasons for this. Some would suggest…

CITB chief Tim Balcon speaks to Luke Haynes about training workers, helping companies and the calls for his organisation to be scrapped

The Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) presents itself as a key part of the solution to the dire skills situation facing the industry with its ageing workforce and lack…

Tim Clark dons his hard hat to visit a construction training centre that its founders hope will capture the hearts and minds of the next generation

I think I’ve crashed my mini-digger. It’s beeping and vibrating, though it might be because I exited the cab without turning the engine off. In…

Thomas Mayhew is senior associate at Fragomen Despite what you might have heard, the UK has one of the more efficient immigration sponsorship regimes in the world. Changes made last year to the post-Brexit immigration system have offered an olive branch of sorts to the industry, making many more construction…

Firms must address skills gaps caused by a post-pandemic rise in early retirement. Adam Branson investigates

The number of people in their fifties and sixties who are economically inactive has grown by more than 250,000 since the start of the pandemic. The rise of older people who are neither in paid…

Lorraine Gregory is regional director of CECA Midlands At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, few would have believed that one of the biggest issues we’d face as an economy is an unemployment rate so low that we could not find the staff with the skills to fill good jobs.…

Construction firms need more help training homegrown workers to replace the EU nationals sucked out of the UK labour market by Brexit, Keith Cooper discovers

Warnings about the impact of Brexit on the construction workforce came thick and fast once the results of the June 2016 poll were in. Trainee numbers had fallen to a…

Russell Haworth is chief executive officer at NBS Have you tried reverse mentoring? For me, it has been a game-changer. I’ve learnt an incredible amount about the way young people view their careers. I’d go so far as to say reverse mentoring will be essential in the construction sector in…

Jane Atkinson is executive director of engineering, automation and projects at Bilfinger UK Many of us have campaigned for years to bring more women into the sector. But, sadly, the improvement has been marginal at best. The latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) data tells us that just 13 per…