Filling the unskilled gap

June 21, 2019 / Keith Osborne
Filling the unskilled gap

Brendan Smith from recruitment specialist O’Neill & Brennan describes a new initiative to recruit new entrants into the construction industry.

Recruiting new people onto construction sites is an increasing headache for the construction industry. There has been much discussion around new apprenticeships and moves to encourage more vocational training, but less around the equally pressing need to recruit less-skilled labour – a particular challenge for housebuilders facing a Section 106 requirement to recruit and train local people.

As a nationwide recruitment operation specialising in construction, O’Neill & Brennan has been right in the centre of this issue. We are regularly asked to recruit local people who may be new to the building industry to fill jobs at entry level. But construction is a complex and potentially dangerous industry and you cannot simply take people with no experience straight on to site.

Our solution is Construct a Career. To ‘join the dots’ in terms of recruitment, training and job opportunities, we have collaborated with two training organisations – Cidori and COSAC – to develop a course that recruits new entrants, provides basic training, supports them through to achieving their CSCS cards and then matches them with real job opportunities.

Both of our partner organisations have been operating in this area for some years and have experience of recruiting and supporting new entrants – typically these will be local college leavers, unemployed people looking for opportunities within construction, people who have had experience but are currently working in other sectors and a number of people currently working on the tools but with no CSCS card to get them onto larger sites.

The demand is not in question. Not only are employers facing huge challenges in recruitment, but, contrary to a widely held view, Cidori reports that construction is seen as a sector promising real opportunity by those seeking employment. It is understood that there is the potential for career progression for people who start right at the bottom of the skill ladder but have the willingness to work hard and progress.

Our industry is often handicapped by its fragmentary approach to recruitment and training, and we see that an entirely new model is required. We believe that Construct A Career provides something genuinely new and could be a game-changer.

Cidori provides government-funded support to move unemployed people into work, giving training in basic employment skills. What appeals about Construct A Career is the partnership with a recruitment organisation that can provide a seamless transition into work.

Not only does this make the training immediately more attractive for the trainees, but also meets the increasing need to demonstrate success, in terms of people gaining employment, to the funding agencies.

The third partner in the mix is COSAC, an organisation that provides health and safety training and has worked with CSCS to develop an internet-based programme – Safe2SiteTM –  delivering the required health and safety learnings for construction site workers and enabling them to achieve the essential Green Card qualification.

The online training is a genuinely new element and COSAC provides the only online training route currently approved by CSCS.

Providing this training by online delivery is a thoroughly modern way of working and we approached COSAC because we believe that radical solutions are needed to break down barriers to entry into the construction sector.

What we found as we worked with the organisation is that the opportunity for online learning is vast and represents an entirely new way of thinking about the delivery of training. The course is structured so that trainees have to engage at every stage. They can pick it up and put it down, learning at times and at a speed that suits them.

At O’Neill & Brennan we see the value of this approach, not just for those entering the industry for the first time, but also those already working in construction, but for whom demonstrating compliance is becoming an ever-greater requirement. We are therefore in partnership with COSAC not just to support new entrants, but also to provide a better way for our existing workforce to upskill to the Green Card and thereby helping them stay in work.

As Andy Mason, managing director of COSAC explains: “Digital training is not a panacea, it needs to be blended with practical training… But nowadays people learn in a different way and they need engaging in a manner and at a time that suits them. Online learning provides that.”

From the O’Neill & Brennan perspective, this combination of provision provides a huge opportunity to make a real and positive contribution to a significant challenge for the construction industry. We need to attract new people into construction and one way to do this has to be to link proactive recruitment, training and job placement.

All of the partners involved in Construct a Career have a proven track record in their specific areas of expertise and all provide national coverage. We are organising training courses to run initially in the geographic areas where we see the greatest immediate need.

Our pilot project, in Birmingham, has resulted in 20 new industry entrants, trained, with CSCS cards and ready to join the sector in the West Midlands. As we run further courses so we can refine the training further and the close communication between employers and training providers ensures that the training is completely relevant and practical, providing site-ready new workers and giving a new cohort of recruits the first step towards a career of real opportunity.

For further information, go to their website or contact O’Neill & Brennan directly on 01707 648 880

 

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