The labour market is in the middle of a critical transformation towards sustainable economic growth and productivity. Labour’s industrial strategy and its curriculum and assessment review both highlight the centrality of skills to achieving its missions for government, but which skills? And how?
Among the many sectors experiencing shortfalls of essential skills in the workforce and growing skills gaps, construction and infrastructure play a particularly crucial role in the central initiative to ‘get Britain building again’.
The Federation for Master Builders reports that we need over 240,000 workers in construction over the next four years to meet demand. This severe shortage of skilled workers is placing an increasing burden on economic growth targets and national projects.
But focusing on technical skills will not be enough.
What skills?
Essential skills like 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.
They also work as a platform for developing other skills such as literacy and numeracy, as well as technical skills. Overlooking them means overlooking 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’re as important for social mobility as for economic growth.
Boosting 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, started using the Skills Builder Partnership’s Universal Framework in its apprenticeship and graduate programme 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.
Amey has since trained line managers across the business to support their teams, enabling them to coach apprentices and graduates in essential skills. It has also integrated reflective practice into formal review processes.
The programme has received overwhelmingly positive feedback and staff report meaningful progress in essential skills development.
Prioritising problem-solving, collaboration and communication in a supportive environment is allowing Amey to address immediate skills gaps and increasing the adaptability and resilience of its workforce.
Recruitment processes
At Morgan Sindall Infrastructure, using the framework to recruit early-career roles widened the talent pool and improved the quality of candidate applications.
As a first step, we worked with the company to pinpoint the key skills required for success in various roles, particularly apprenticeships. We then supported them to reframe requirements using the framework to clearly articulate the desired essential skills.
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 candidate evaluation, benchmarking and feedback.
Since embedding essential skills into their recruitment processes, the organisation has experienced a 170-per cent increase in candidates deemed suitable for roles, as well as greater applicant diversity.
So embedding essential skills is not only transformative for recruitment but it also unlocks the untapped potential of huge numbers of previously excluded potential recruits.
Long-term investment
The challenge of skills shortages in these industries is not one that can be solved overnight, and the government’s commitment to increase Britain’s building and infrastructure capacity can only be realised if we have the workforce to support it.
To truly unleash the potential of the construction and infrastructure sectors to drive our national economic recovery, government and employers alike must invest in essential skills.
Employers adopt 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 to government, it must not lose sight of what have often been dismissively dubbed in education as ‘soft skills’. They are, in fact, essential, and young people should be developing them long before they reach the workplace.
If we want to ensure infrastructure projects are delivered on time and to the highest standards, and if we want to set the country on a path to long-term prosperity, essential skills are… well… essential.
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