Constructionskills, the new name for the old Sector Skills Council for the construction industry, announced this week an extension to the £1000 sweetener offered construction companies for taking on an apprentice made redundant by another construction company.
It must be devastating for a young apprentice to discover he or she is out of a job so soon after the heady and optimistic days of the boom. And 2194 of them have been displaced over the last 10 months alone according to Constructionskills.
But it seems to me as an HVAC recruiter that the conditions are never right to take on apprentices in an industry that is so subject to boom and bust.
During boom conditions employers only want new employees who can ‘hit the ground running’ because they are so busy they haven’t the time or spare manpower to train. While in bust conditions employers are so worried about where the next project will come from they only take the bare minimum of staff and still want only those who can ‘hit the ground running.’
How the message has changed in only 18 months.
Back in June 2008 the incoming Chief Executive for Constructionskills Mark Farrar warned that despite a 20% growth in the construction workforce since the early 1990s we faced an aging workforce with the number of older workers ( those aged 60 and over) doubling over the period and those aged 24 and under falling by 25%. He talked about a ‘workforce time bomb’. Now they sympathize with frightened employers and offer a bribe.
But the time bomb wasn’t in the workforce. It was in the low interests rates, unsafe loans, the political claims of an end to boom and bust and the lack of regulation that fuelled the greed and asset bubble built on debt that has now burst.
And now, young and older workers are both laid off. The Centre for Economics and Business Research predicts that business failures in the building sector will rise by 101.8 per cent over 2009 compared with 2008 levels.
What a way to run an industry
