Recruit skilled construction workers from diverse groups

An out­dat­ed image of men – and it usu­al­ly was only men — in filthy over­alls, dig­ging holes in pour­ing rain, still clings.

It has to change. With the begin­nings of an eco­nom­ic recov­ery, the coun­try is build­ing again and con­struc­tion does not want to be caught out by yet anoth­er skills short­age when demand increas­es.

As the Con­struc­tion Indus­try Train­ing Board (CITB) has shown, employ­ment is pick­ing up from the depths of the reces­sion to an expect­ed 2.65 mil­lion this year and push­ing 2.7 mil­lion by 2016.

Per­haps the most rad­i­cal approach is to change the nature of con­struc­tion itself by using com­po­nents made in fac­to­ries, trans­port­ed to sites and fit­ted togeth­er into build­ings, though con­ven­tion­al work, like exca­va­tion, would of course still be need­ed.

Laing O’Rourke is among major con­trac­tors pro­mot­ing this approach, accord­ing to its sus­tain­abil­i­ty direc­tor Car­o­line Black­man.

“Off-site work is the way we are start­ing to go,” she says. “That changes our needs from tra­di­tion­al trades to being much more about man­u­fac­tur­ing, with a lot of empha­sis on logis­tics, plan­ning and design, and on lift­ing and crane strate­gies.

“We think that has a total­ly dif­fer­ent skills pro­file with a lot more pro­fes­sion­al and semi-pro­fes­sion­al jobs, which suits the way the UK is going as more peo­ple go into ter­tiary edu­ca­tion.”

The skills need­ed are out there in groups the indus­try has not reached before

Ms Black­well con­cedes the indus­try must con­vince clients of the mer­its of off-site con­struc­tion, though hopes that offer­ing greater speed will help.

Anoth­er per­sua­sive fac­tor, for both con­ven­tion­al and off-site projects, is the use of build­ing infor­ma­tion mod­el­ling, so “you can show a client the whole build­ing in a vir­tu­al mod­el”.

She adds: “Young peo­ple find work­ing with com­put­ers and engi­neer­ing very attrac­tive, and it is open to a far more diverse group than con­struc­tion was before.”

For tra­di­tion­al site work, Ms Black­well says: “Sites are now clean­er and more attrac­tive places to work. In the past 20 years there has been a fun­da­men­tal change in safe­ty and this is now a good and excit­ing place to work.”

Vicky Skene, direc­tor of employ­ee engage­ment and inclu­sion at Bal­four Beat­ty Con­struc­tion Ser­vices UK, puts empha­sis on widen­ing the pool of poten­tial recruits.

Only a few years ago, a con­struc­tion con­trac­tor tak­ing an ini­tia­tive on sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion might, to say the least, have pro­voked com­ment and a dis­abil­i­ty ini­tia­tive cause only slight­ly less sur­prise.

But these have been among Bal­four Beatty’s approach­es. Ms Skene says: “We are doing this because it’s good for busi­ness. If you just recruit among groups, which you always recruit­ed from, then when you’re look­ing at a project, you are always going to get the same answers; you don’t get peo­ple who think dif­fer­ent­ly, so you miss out on orig­i­nal per­spec­tives. There is a lot of evi­dence for that.”

She says Bal­four Beatty’s diver­si­ty work is start­ing to make a dif­fer­ence with, for exam­ple, more female staff return­ing after mater­ni­ty leave once the com­pa­ny active­ly drew atten­tion to this pos­si­bil­i­ty.

“It’s about not los­ing tal­ent. For exam­ple, if some­one applied for a job, but says fam­i­ly respon­si­bil­i­ties mean they want to work four days a week, we’ll allow that if we can,” she says.

Bal­four Beatty’s employ­ee sur­vey this year will ask about sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion and the com­pa­ny has set up a staff les­bian, gay, bisex­u­al, and trans­gen­der net­work.

Ms Skene says: “It is real­ly brave, giv­en tra­di­tion­al atti­tudes, and we were not sure how it would be received, but it has land­ed real­ly well among our staff and allows the indus­try to be more open.”

Work on dis­abil­i­ties looks at how peo­ple could be sup­port­ed into work appro­pri­ate to their capa­bil­i­ties.

“It could mean office work, but could also be on-site,” Ms Skene says. “For exam­ple, peo­ple with dyslex­ia or dys­prax­ia may need only some small adjust­ments made and they can work.”

Uncon­scious bias train­ing has start­ed with senior man­agers and will be spread through the com­pa­ny to site “tool­box talks”.

To more gen­er­al­ly bur­nish the industry’s image, younger Bal­four Beat­ty staff are work­ing with school stu­dents through the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme to pro­mote con­struc­tion “as an OK place to work and not some­where just con­cerned with dig­ging holes”, she says.

“My view is that the industry’s prob­lem is not one of pay, but rather this per­cep­tion that we just stick spades in the ground – and there is an edu­ca­tion piece to be done.”

The CITB, which pro­vides indus­try­wide train­ing, is also at work on diver­si­ty. Employ­er ser­vices direc­tor Mike Bilayj says: “We are encour­ag­ing the indus­try to ensure it has a diverse intake. Eth­nic minor­i­ty and women entrants are need­ed because, with the recov­ery, the indus­try is already expe­ri­enc­ing skills short­age and it will only get worse unless it can har­ness the skills of the best peo­ple. The skills need­ed are out there in groups the indus­try has not reached before.”

Mr Bilayj says the indus­try “can­not rely on careers ser­vices” to solve its image prob­lem and “we need to get across the oppor­tu­ni­ties and good long-term prospects in every­thing from trade to tech­ni­cal posts to pro­fes­sion­al ones”, in par­tic­u­lar through work in schools.

Eco­nom­ic rea­sons will bring com­pa­nies round to embrac­ing diver­si­ty and improv­ing the industry’s image, as oth­er­wise: “It will sim­ply not have the skilled work­force it needs.”

He con­cludes: “This is all in the industry’s own inter­est.”