The SkillsPlanner project – which aims to bring the power of “open data” to the construction industry’s skills problem – kicked off an initial two-year programme for London and the south east this week.
The £1.3m project is being steered by Ethos VO, a consultancy and social enterprise, and is funded by Innovate UK.
It also has financial support from the Thames Tideway Tunnel, the London Boroughs of Westminster, Camden and Islington, the Association of London Colleges and others.
The project aims to gather accurate data from the industry on future skills needs, mapped to training capacity and the current qualifications and experience of industry workers, to help address the widening skills shortfall in the industry.
But the launch included an appeal to various bodies in the industry – employers, organisations such as CITB and CSCS, and professional bodies – to pool data and work towards establishing common definitions on skills and employment categories.
Project director Rebecca Lovelace also outlined to Construction Manager a future workstream looking at the future skills the industry would need, as the industry increasingly embraces offsite manufacturing and digital technologies.
At the launch event this week, Thames Tideway chief executive Andy Mitchell told guests: “If we keep on doing the things we’ve been doing, the problem isn’t going to get better. Unless we do more to address the challenges we’re all bored of talking about, we’ll get what we deserve.”
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He also described Thames Tideway’s commitment to developing skills via the project, with a declaration to train one “proper” apprentice for every 50 people on site, and one ex-offender for every 100 people on site.
It also hopes to achieve gender parity among its workforce by the end of the project in 2025, although not necessarily among the onsite construction workforce, Mitchell said.
Caroline Blackman, head of sustainability at Laing O’Rourke and a member of a discussion panel at the event, said: “The [skills] gap is getting larger, and we’re just making do, we’re not raising competence levels or productivity.”
She also welcomed SkillsPlanner as a tool to show parents and the general public that “there’s a pipeline of work and projects that can develop people’s careers”.
SkillsPlanner is also being backed by SEME4, the consultancy run by Sir Nigel Shadbolt, a pioneer of the World Wide Web and open data. At the launch, he described SkillsPlanner as part of a new “data infrastructure”, which includes, for instance, data on every bus route and business location, and allow us to “ask Google” for any route instantaneously.
