A guest blog by Spencer Wicks, Inner Circle Consulting
The fact that organisations from across the housing sector are currently experiencing and expecting a growing skills shortage will come as no surprise to readers. This crisis is well-documented and reported upon, including a report from the London Homes Coalition stating that in the next 5 years in London alone, “[they will] need approximately 10,000 workers annually to meet management ambitions and up to 31,000 workers to support planned new build investments. This demand represents about 10% of the overall construction workforce in the capital.”
Recently, the Building Cost Information Service has also warned that the new Labour government’s pledge to deliver 1.5 million new homes in this parliament has not yet considered the time it will take to train the workforce required, citing a Construction Industry Training Board estimate that 152,000 new workers will be needed to deliver that pledge.
While Labour’s Skills for Future plan does emphasise the significant requirements of the construction industry, we as a sector will need to work together to address this challenge if we are going play a meaningful role in attracting and upskilling the people required to deliver a million and a half homes in a few short years.
As a member of this year’s Housing Forum Futures Network, I was involved in the exploration of the pressing issues of skills shortages in the UK housing sector. By surveying and interviewing Housing Forum members, we uncovered trends in the challenges the sector currently faces and expects to face in hiring, training and retaining talent. While each organisation faces unique obstacles, there are some common themes including higher costs around training and hiring qualified professionals that can deliver safe, high-quality, and sustainable housing.
This research emphasised something worth remembering: we’re not in this alone. If all you’re holding is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. But when we look at what our peers across the sector have in their toolboxes, we might just find the right combination of tools to tackle the skills shortage together and coordinate a sector-wide response.
Whether the organisation is a landowner, designer, manufacturer or builder, it is clear that to confront this challenge, we can learn from best practice from all of the different organisations involved in delivering the homes the UK so desperately needs.
If you’re only going to focus on two things to be a part of addressing this crisis, let it revolve around:
- Recruitment – go beyond on where you may typically seek both new and experienced team members and encourage the industry to invite new people into the sector; and
- Retention – invest in upgrading skills to respond to policy and client and organisational objectives to foster an employee environment in which people want to join, stick around and grow in their roles where they feel valued.
Our research highlights various strategies organisations are using to attract, develop, and retain the necessary workforce to meet the UK’s housing needs. By sharing these best practices, we hope to help others adopt effective methods for addressing skills gaps more rapidly. This collaborative effort is essential to speeding up and improving current approaches to building the homes the UK so desperately needs.
Organisations that are excelling in bolstering their teams and supporting their business plans are doing by in large part attracting new talent, retaining employees, and developing those employees’ skillsets by proactively seeking newcomers and integrating strong retention strategies that prioritise employee growth around their areas of interest. This involves investing in professional accreditations and creating mentorship programs, fostering growth within the organisation rather than solely relying on competitive wages to bring staff in from elsewhere. Where more expertise is required based on large measures of market uncertainty, wages can often be a reliable means of attracting talent. This means that a longer-term vision around skills profiles is a crucial component of supporting an organisation’s evolving needs and adding resilience, while also signalling the range of possibilities to young people that may not otherwise understand what their future in the sector may look like. Organisations look to attract individuals with transferable skills from other sectors, and fund dedicated learning and development programmes across roles, particularly catered toward more junior staff. This approach also ensures that newcomers don’t just stumble into the industry by chance, but actively pursue what can become an exciting and fulfilling career with companies and local authorities that support and accelerate their growth.
The Housing Forum Futures Network invites you to read our report to learn more about what best practice looks like across the different types of companies involved in housing delivery, and to stay tuned to the Housing Forum in the coming weeks for the release of interviews with those best addressing skills shortages. Sharing these insights can help inform your own organisation’s strategies for team development and preparing for the coming years. It’s crucial to share our knowledge to advance our industry collectively and assemble a toolbox of approaches that serve our shared aims.
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