Mapping The Talent Gap: A Barrier To Housing Delivery

It’s a simple fact that despite media fanfare about robots taking human jobs, without experienced construction labour, housing will not be delivered.

There are thousands of jobs available in surveying, property and construction and a very pressing need for labour (both in physical and professional disciplines). 

This has been the status quo for decades. However, the gap has never been more evident with the drive to deliver housing amid mounting viability, planning and numerous other cost and supply side constraints. 

Government rhetoric has picked up on this talent gap. A year ago today in the Chancellors budget, it was announced that 60,000 construction workers would be trained up and 10 specialist skills colleges were to be created. The colleges have been named and are broadly operational. However, the 60,000 workers are a longer-term ploy and significant progress in this isn’t expected for another three years.

As with many recent announcements and proposals put forward by the Government for the good of the property industry, the intentions are well-meaning, but the practical delivery stops short of making significant structural change.

The root of the problem still lies in education. Despite the existence of these hundreds of thousands of jobs, any person below the age of 18 wouldn’t know what the vast majority are or do. Many ‘fall into’ surveying after conversion courses following degrees they don’t need or use. If we educated people at school-age on the wide array of careers there are in our industry, we could get them embedded earlier, trained and chartered earlier and earning earlier. These years would shortcut the wastage and go some way towards plugging the skills gap.

If you asked a 16-year-old what they think a career in property means, I suspect the answer would be a builder on site or an estate agent. Yet there are hundreds of different disciplines with a scale of technical skills that could suit a diverse array of young people as they consider their future working lives.

Whilst various industry initiatives exist to diversify the talent in the building sector, to date little progress has been made. At Rapleys we have been growing our Building Surveying (and wider Building Consultancy) teams at pace. We have been lucky at being able to attract talent thanks to our investment in people attracting the brightest and best but we have also seen a real lack of supply in the senior surveyor and associate levels in particular, which rings alarm bells as these are the future of our discipline and, without being too dramatic, the future of the built environment.

The RICS has been working hard to make its pathways framework more fit for purpose and move talent through to chartership as well as other disciplines. The support for apprenticeships has also been welcomed and something we have embraced as a business.

However, until we widely educate young people on the opportunities ahead in this profession, the delivery of homes will be held up by a lack of experts.  Given the new waves of legislation related to our trade, expert advice has never been more in demand. From Awaab’s Law, the Decent Homes Standard and the updated Building Safety Act, there is a laser focus on safely constructed housing on top of the ambitious delivery targets widely published.

In the private sector we can all play our bit. Like others, our teams regularly visit schools to present on the building careers that the property industry offer. But we cannot rely on this solely to get the message across. 

We need a joined up educational strategy and campaign, mandated by Government to reach people of school age not only to present the opportunities involved in such a career, but to dispel the myth that AI and technology is replacing human skills and qualifications. This simply isn’t the case. In fact, technology is a support to the often-technical work that Chartered Surveyors, for example, undertake. 

Surveying is also a distinctly social discipline, where the focus is more on people than just the property. Junior team members are supported and mentored by qualified, senior experts through their APCs and into their own career development. It also comes with flexibility with roles that can be shaped around changing lifestyles and priorities. These attributes should be highlighted as part of the education process so that females, for example, are not put off by what they assume are very male dominated hard-hat wearing manual jobs.

More than ever we are facing a very real threat of a dearth of talent at just the time we need it most – not only to deliver 1.5m homes, but to ensure they are healthy and safe, compliant with legislation and supportive of long-term sustainable communities.

We need a real roadmap that attracts our future generation of building talent – whether this is on-site, professional or managerial and this starts at school, not once students have graduated and realise they need a job. The private sector can help lend our expertise to help map this out in a realistic and deliverable manner. Who else is up for it?