PLANNING & DESIGN
“ Cross-training employees can also create greater operational flexibility, allowing teams to adapt when labour availability changes. Just as importantly, companies need to focus on attracting and retaining skilled workers to create clear career development opportunities and foster workplace cultures where employees feel valued. Organisations that take a proactive approach to workforce planning will be better positioned to navigate labour challenges and support future growth.”
This matches the direction of federal policy in the US, where the Department of Labour has committed US $ 145m to expand registered apprenticeships, with construction a priority sector, alongside roughly 290,000 people already enrolled nationally.
In the UK, CITB’ s £ 267m( US $ 362m) commitment sits alongside calls for closer alignment between training providers and the trades genuinely short of workers. They come as misaligned provision has left some regional gaps, particularly in bricklaying and electrical work, largely untouched.
Resourcing gaps and retention Vicky’ s central argument is that workforce planning and project planning need to happen together, not in sequence.“ There is a clear opportunity for employers to build greater resilience by looking at workforce planning alongside project planning,” she says.“ Construction workers place a high value on long-term job security, cited by 74 % when rating their current employer.
Giving people greater visibility and confidence around future opportunities, while building a clearer picture of the skills needed across the project pipeline, can help employers strengthen retention and reduce the risk of resourcing gaps further down the line.”
She frames the shortage less as a single crisis to be solved and more as a condition contractors will need to manage on an ongoing basis.“ Ultimately, the organisations best placed to manage labour shortages will be those that plan for flexibility in advance,” Vicky says.
“ That means anticipating where skills gaps are likely to emerge, investing in training and upskilling, developing stronger talent pools and using the right mix of permanent, temporary and contract talent to meet changing project needs. Aligning those workforce decisions more closely with long-term project planning can give businesses greater resilience when schedules or resource requirements change.”
That blended approach – permanent staff, cross-trained internal teams and flexible contract labour, underpinned by longer apprenticeship pipelines – is emerging as the closest thing the industry has to a shared playbook on both sides of the Atlantic.
Businesses pairing workforce planning with project planning, investing early in training pipelines and protecting existing teams from burnout will be better placed to keep schedules on track.
Those that treat resourcing as an afterthought risk longer delays, higher costs and the loss of talent.
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