Can digitalisation bring young people into the construction industry?

The UK is facing a young people crisis. Recent news reports that one million 16- to 24-year-olds are not in education, employment, or training (NEET), equating to 13.5% of the demographic, costing an estimated £125bn per year.

In a recent government report, the issue is framed as a “generational fault line”, noting that the NEET rate has barely crept below 10% in 25 years and 45% of today’s 24-year-old NEETs have never had a job.

Behind these statistics are young people with talent and potential who do not have a clear route into work, skills, or confidence.

At the same time, the built environment is undergoing a significant transformation. BIM, digital twins, AI, reality capture and data-led ways of working are changing how we design, construct, operate and maintain the places around us. The sector urgently needs new digital capability, while young people need visible pathways into meaningful work. These two challenges should not be seen separately.

For many young people, construction and the built environment are still seen through an outdated lens: site only, heavily manual and difficult to access. As many of us know and continue to promote, that perception misses what the modern built environment has become.

Today’s industry needs information managers, digital surveyors, data analysts, sustainability modellers, computational designers, AI-literate project managers and people who can translate complex information between clients, designers, contractors and asset operators.

These roles exist now. Digital tools are already embedded in much of our work. A career in the digital built environment means operating within a connected ecosystem that enables us to make material changes to the world around us and improve people’s lives. That’s pretty cool.

Part of what makes this sector accessible is how varied the routes in can be. Not every young person will arrive through a traditional university pathway, nor should they have to. T-levels in construction and digital were among the first three introduced in 2020 and are now an established route.

Foundation and degree apprenticeships also exist across digital engineering and built environment disciplines, including roles that focus on digital models, visualisation, construction data and whole-life asset information.

One example of what this can look like in practice is PlanBEE – Plan for Built Environment Education. Launched by Ryder and Gateshead College, PlanBEE is an industry-led higher apprenticeship designed as an alternative route into professional careers in the built environment.

Its rotational model gives young people exposure to different disciplines while earning and learning, with a strong emphasis on digital skills and collaborative working.

So, the pathways are there, but too few young people know they exist and too few employers actively promote them.

Yet the next generation already possesses skillsets and passions that are a natural addition to the built environment. A young person who has spent hours in gaming environments already has excellent spatial reasoning that translates directly into modelling and visualisation.

Someone who is motivated by climate action may find real purpose in whole-life carbon analysis or retrofit data. Someone who has struggled in conventional classrooms may find their footing through applied, project-based learning, where digital skills connect to tangible outcomes.

And what better tangible outcome is there than seeing a new building on the skyline, knowing you helped shape it?

AI is already changing work in the built environment, including the entry-level tasks that have traditionally helped young people learn on the job. If employers use AI to reduce these tasks, this can lead to a reduction in junior roles, making the ladder into work much harder to climb.

Young people cannot become experienced professionals if they are never given the opportunity to be beginners.

If any sector strips out its entry-level pipeline in the name of short-term efficiency, it will face a much deeper capability problem soon when there are fewer experienced people to draw on. The issue isn’t AI itself, but unmanaged adoption.

Used well, I have no doubt that AI can widen access, enabling young people (and older, too, for that matter!) to learn technical language faster, test and prototype ideas, interrogate data, understand regulations and, ultimately, build confidence. It can support those in their early careers as a learning aid, but should not be used as a substitute for mentoring, judgement or accumulated experience.

This matters because AI is no longer theoretical in construction. NBS’s Digital Construction Report 2025 found that more than two in five construction professionals now use AI in their daily work, compared with fewer than one in 10 five years ago. Common uses include searching for technical information, drafting and reviewing text, and analysing project data. RICS has also reported that while optimism about AI in construction is high, adoption is uneven, with skills shortages, data quality and system integration among the main barriers.

If AI is implemented without paying attention to skills planning and development, without ethical safeguards, and without any inclusion strategy, it will reinforce existing inequalities. Those with access to technology, networks and confidence will move faster. Those already furthest from work may be left further behind. But if the sector invests in inclusive digital education, paid pathways and responsible AI literacy, digitalisation can become a bridge rather than a barrier.

Showing young people the real work is a great start, such as how data can improve building safety, how information management allows diverse teams to collaborate without losing control of decisions, how AI supports design optioneering, and how digital tools support net-zero targets. This is the sort of work that isn’t shouted about enough outside of our industry and therefore becomes invisible to the people who might choose to do it.

Beyond visibility, employers need to rethink early career roles. If AI changes the tasks that junior staff used to do, the answer is not to remove the role but to redesign early-career learning. Even in my role designing digital transformation strategies for organisations, we should always ask ourselves: where are the opportunities for trainees and apprenticeships, and how are we building human judgement alongside technology and AI capability?

The government’s Youth Guarantee funding includes £820m over the spending review period, from 2026/27 to 2028/29, to support young people into learning, work, apprenticeships and wider training. The built environment sector should actively engage with this programme and bring existing initiatives into the centre, including funded digital apprenticeship routes, employer partnerships with further and higher education, industry-backed T-level placements, and proven models such as PlanBEE.

Practical change also means creating accessible routes into paid work placements, with employers that are willing to value potential, curiosity and adaptability.

For Women in BIM, this is also a representation issue. Digital transformation will only succeed if it includes a wider range of voices, particularly considering young women and underrepresented groups are still too often discouraged from technical careers before they have even seen what those careers look like. We have a responsibility to make those opportunities visible.

So, the built environment has a skills challenge, and young people have an opportunity challenge. Digitalisation can help solve both, but only if we design the pathways intentionally. If we get this right, digitalisation will not only make our sector more productive. It will make it more inclusive, more resilient, and more relevant to the young people whose futures depend on the places we create.