The surveyors we’re not training today are the ones we’ll need most tomorrow

Every few years the property industry tells itself a skills shortage is coming. This time it isn’t coming. It’s here, and we are in danger of universities closing the door on the next generation. The signs are already there.

Birmingham City University has withdrawn five of its six building surveying routes/course variants. It is not alone. Across the country, building surveying programmes are being merged into generic “construction” degrees, pared back to top-up or apprenticeship routes, or dropped where applications no longer cover the cost of delivery. Each decision makes sense on a university spreadsheet. Taken together, they amount to a slow dismantling of a profession.

To be clear, students haven’t abandoned the built environment. Many are choosing broader degrees such as construction project management, real estate, architecture and quantity surveying, or general business and data courses. Those sound flexible and promise a wider choice of careers. Others are skipping university and going straight into degree apprenticeships, which is a sensible choice we should encourage rather than regret.

The reasons are understandable. An 18-year-old taking on more than £9,500 a year in fees wants a degree that keeps their options open and gives them the best chance of securing a decent role post-graduation. Building surveying looks narrow from the outside and still suffers from perceptions of hard hats or, at the other end of the scale, the need for intense technical training. Graduate salaries start modestly, and the route to chartership takes several more years of supervised experience before the earnings catch up. Next to a degree with “management” or “digital” in the title, it looks like a gamble.

Then there is AI. Many young people assume that anything involving inspection, reports and data will be automated before their student loan is paid off. They are wrong about that, but it isn’t hard to see why they believe it. Our profession has not done enough to explain what a building surveyor actually does, so school-leavers fill the gap with guesswork if they’ve even heard of the profession in the first place.

The irony is that demand for building surveying skills has rarely been higher.

The Building Safety Act and the new Building Safety Regulator gateway regime for higher-risk buildings have increased the technical scrutiny needed on every scheme. Awaab’s Law and the wider push on damp, mould and housing standards rely on people who can diagnose why a building is failing, not just record that it is. Rising energy efficiency standards, retrofit targets and the decarbonisation of existing stock all need someone who understands how a 1930s semi or a 1970s office block actually performs, and what happens when you wrap it in insulation without thinking about moisture.

On top of that comes the Government’s ambition for 1.5 million new homes this Parliament, alongside significant investment in schools, hospitals, energy and transport infrastructure. Every one of those projects needs building surveyors for contract administration, defects, dilapidations, party walls, compliance and long-term asset management.

We are not starting from strength. The RICS’s own research found that building surveying and quantity surveying have the most severe shortages in the profession. Two-thirds of surveyors named an ageing workforce and high retirement rates as a main cause. Closing courses now, as experienced people head for retirement, doesn’t just widen that gap. It risks making it permanent.

I’m enthusiastic about technology. Drones, laser scanning, thermal imaging and AI-assisted reporting are already making our surveyors faster and more thorough. Interestingly, younger surveyors are among the most optimistic about it.

But a drone can’t tell you whether a crack is historic settlement or active subsidence. An algorithm can’t stand in a basement, smell the damp and trace it to a failed detail three floors up. Software can’t judge whether a landlord’s schedule of dilapidations is reasonable, or explain to a nervous client what a defect really means for their building and their budget. That judgement is built over decades: in lofts, on scaffolds, in disputes and on site, learning from the people who went before.

That is the real risk. Within ten years a large share of the profession’s most experienced practitioners will have retired. If there is no cohort behind them to absorb what they know, that knowledge won’t move into a database. It will simply disappear. Digital tools only add value when someone is qualified to interpret what they produce.

This isn’t a problem that universities can solve alone, and it’s not fair to blame them for responding to falling demand. The industry has to create that demand.

That means employers backing apprenticeships and sponsoring students properly, not just complaining about shortages at conferences. It means the RICS, universities and practices working together to redesign courses so building surveying is presented as the broad, varied career it really is. It covers heritage, health, education, residential, commercial, alternatives, law, sustainability, data and technology. And it means all of us going into schools and colleges to explain that this is a profession where technology makes you better at the job, not unnecessary.

The buildings we live, learn and work in aren’t getting simpler, and the legislation around them isn’t getting lighter. If we don’t train the people who understand them, we will discover the cost of that decision at exactly the moment we can least afford it. As an industry, we are in real danger of exacerbating the skills gap rather than fixing it. This feels like a pivotal moment to take action.