Innovative techniques and technologies are set to drive growth, yet the industry faces major challenges in finding people with the right digital construction skills. Rebecca De Cicco, global chair of Women in BIM and principal for digital enablement at Aurecon, says it is time for action
The Future of Jobs report, published in 2020 by the World Economic Forum, is a research summary of the jobs and skills of the future, tracking the pace of change across all sectors.
It aims to shed light on the disruptions caused by the pandemic, contextualised within a longer history of economic cycles and the expected outlook for technology adoption, jobs and skills in the next five years.
Some of the data suggests that across the majority of the countries covered in the report, on average over 62% of organisations and their people will require some form of upskilling or training, regardless of the field they work in.
The research showed that this would increase by a further 11% by 2025, highlighting the urgency of skills development and upskilling in technologies and processes relating to digital uptake across all sectors.
The ability for companies to harness growth potential relating to new processes and technological adoption is quite clearly hindered by skills shortages across all sectors globally. These skills gaps and the inability to attract the right talent remain among the leading barriers to the adoption of new technologies and processes.
Digital skills for construction
This is particularly true for those who are employed in the construction industry. We are seeing high numbers of people either leaving the industry or pivoting into other industries with their digital skills, all fuelled by the construction market being slower than others in its digital adoption. We know what BIM, digital engineering and international standards are the drivers for our industry, yet we are currently faced with low numbers of skilled workers in this space. Why is this, and what can we do about it?
Industry-leading organisations should investigate ideas around the future of the skills requirement and the way we work to enable productivity and greater efficiencies. Although many organisations are beginning to do just this, there is still a resistance when it comes to the adoption of new technology and processes to allow organisations (large and small) to grow.
The pandemic has taught us that we need to change our approach toward the way we deliver projects and the technologies used to do so. It is a critical issue in our industry that only 42% of employees take up any opportunity to reskill or upskill in their roles, only further highlighting the resistance to enable change across the built environment. We need industry leaders to reverse this thinking and encourage change.
At present, there are still considerable challenges in finding skilled employees in digital construction and digital engineering but even more so across a range of new, emerging roles in our industry. Organisations are consistently citing difficulties when hiring or finding the right talent and many are resorting to extreme measures to retain people with these skills.
In addition to the concerns relating to the way we adopt new technologies, there should also be an understanding internally within our organisations as to what skills are required. This type of data can be used as a framework for how organisations develop a data-driven approach to skills measurement and upskilling, which is now somewhat unfamiliar in the context of the construction industry.
Emerging roles in the industry
Emerging roles are beginning to populate the construction industry, such as data analysts and scientists, artificial intelligence and machine learning specialists, as well as software and application developers. As you can imagine, skills in these relatively new areas are even harder to source. While an exact skills match is not a prerequisite to making a job transition or even being employed, the long-term productivity of employees is determined by their skill of key competencies in these areas, all of which are very difficult to procure.
Many organisations are beginning to invest more heavily in innovative processes and techniques, yet it is not currently mainstream in the construction sector. Much of the research suggests that new technologies are set to drive growth across industries, as well as to increase the demand for new job roles and skill sets. Such positive effects may be counterbalanced by workforce disruptions. A substantial amount of concern exists about how technological adoption could impact workers’ jobs by replacing some tasks performed by humans into the realm of work performed by machines.
The extent of disruption will vary depending on a worker’s occupation and skill set. There is already a strong focus across large-scale advisory organisations on automation, focusing on enabling menial tasks to be completed using automated techniques and focusing on humans for the scope of leadership and innovation roles.
What is the outlook for digital construction skills?
While there may not be a quick fix, we do need to act fast to close the gap in our digital construction skills shortages.
And the outlook is positive, employers have the opportunity to upskill their workforce and in doing so they retain vital team members. Also, with the increase of apprenticeship schemes, many opportunities present themselves in bringing in new people to our teams who are eager to learn.
We don’t need to reinvent our workforce; we need to rethink it!
Rebecca De Cicco
Global chair
Women in BIM
