The age demographic problem in the construction industry has accelerated.
For anyone prepared to listen I have been banging on for years of the greater value of apprentices and apprentice training.
For thirty years or more both the major political parties have seen it as a top priority to show how they are educating our young people and giving opportunities to particularly students from poorer backgrounds. Their objective has been to get as many children as possible on full time education university courses. The target, I believe, was usually c. 50%.
As a consequence, the university sector expanded massively. It has become an over large industry, with many of the bad sides of an overgrown industry emerging. Quality goes down and the outputs are much more geared to what the industry wants rather than the end user. So in the case of universities, it is far more profitable to have a 100 students in a lecture hall with one lecturer talking about American studies, compared with say 1 staff for 10 students in subjects, which are technical such as architecture or biochemistry that may be much more of a benefit to our society and economy in the future. But require greater staff input.
This subject is so pertinent to many others as well. As David Smith (who has spoken in Leicester a few times) put it so succinctly in his Sunday Times Business Section column last week: We need to raise our game. Our real weakness in real wages is driven by no improvements in productivity in the last 15 years. Hardly earth shattering, but he identifies three main reasons of which the first is lack of skills in our work force. Secondly, investment in business is down and well below pre-pandemic levels, which were low anyway. The final area he identifies is a proper infrastructure strategy and investment in it.
I was recently sent an article on a Construction Economic Overview (thanks Chris Leeson) by Professor Noble Francis. Like elsewhere, Francis particularly points to the industry’s skills shortage and highlights the loss of nearly 250,000 workers in the industry in the last three years, with the largest losses in the age range 45 to 59. He suggests that the age demographic problem has accelerated in that time period. Because younger EC workers can no longer gain so easy access to the UK, the long-term structural problem in the UK construction industry is coming much earlier and indeed is upon us now.
We therefore have a perfect storm. We are still not encouraging anything like enough of our youngsters into industries we need. Construction is just one of many. And it is going to get worse, not better. Three years ago, when I was looking for an apprenticeship for my son, I was meeting the comment we don’t do training, we prefer to take people fully trained. Mercifully not every company is like that and he secured a place with a great firm. Most are not so lucky.
As a society we have got to do better. I implore those in a position of employing people to do more. My experience and I know of others, such as Corporate Architecture, is that they get better workers who know what is required to be effective in the work place if their tertiary education has run in parallel with solid employment. That is an apprenticeship. There may be some short-term pain, but in the long run it has to be better for your company and UK PLC.
