TRAINING
New decade, new look workforce needed
The building engineering workforce of the 2020s will look very different to earlier decades, according to BESA Training’s head of analytics, Helen Yeulet.
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ach of the last three decades saw long periods of low investment in training and recruitment, which has left the industry playing a tricky game of skills catch-up. On top of this, we now have a serious demographic problem at both ends of the scale. Around 50% of people working in building services related jobs are expected to retire before the end of this decade – how do we replace that experience and expertise? We are still struggling at the new entrant level too. One large building services employer, who usually recruits 400 apprentices into its academy each year, was only able to take on 66% of their usual number – missing their target for the second year running. It was not due to any lack of investment or effort, but to a declining number of potential recruits, which if it continues at the current rate, will mean that firm has missed a complete years’ worth of recruitment over a three-year period. This is because the millennial surge in birth rate has now passed through the apprenticeship availability gate and is ramping up competition for recruits – a problem that is not confined to the UK. Most European countries have the same problem, including Germany and Switzerland, which we tend to look up to as exemplars in this area.
Competence
However, the Hackitt Review that followed the Grenfell Tower fire tragedy could prove to be a game changer for the UK. It has brought into sharp focus the need for companies to be able to prove the competence of their people. For too long, many construction related trades relied on vague qualifications that failed to answer the most important question of all: Is this person qualified for the job they are being asked to do? It might seem an extraordinary thing to any outside observer, but that has been the case for
34 February 2020
some time and the results have been clear to see in quality and safety problems across our building stock. Many new buildings use between double and four times the amount of energy they should and the NHS spends between £1.4bn and £2bn a year on health problems caused by poor standard buildings. Around 44,000 people die in the UK every year as a result of air pollution, but most people spend an average of 90% of their time indoors. Buildings need to be safe havens from polluted outside air – yet new research shows that indoor air can often be as much as 13 times worse than what is out on the street. Thanks to Hackitt, building owners will be required to face up to their responsibilities for the lifetime of their built asset – not just see it as a way of getting a quick return on an investment – and any crucial life safety decisions taken during construction, refurbishment and operation will be there for all to see. This is also of interest to insurers, who will keep up the pressure for building owners and operators to maintain safe and healthy conditions or face the financial consequences. On top of this, our government is now legally
bound to deliver a net zero carbon economy by 2050. How will that be possible without thousands of skilled workers able to design, install and commission low to zero carbon technologies and overhaul huge swathes of our built environment? Specifically, for the ACR sector, we are seeing a dramatic shift into new and ‘alternative’ refrigerants thanks to the efforts of the F-Gas Regulation to reduce our harmful impact on the environment. The vice chair of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), Baroness Brown, told a recent industry conference that the UK would have to move away from F-Gases completely. No phase down for her, she wants us out of environmentally harmful gases quickly and new solutions put in their place. At the same time, the adoption of ‘smart’
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