The Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) has welcomed the Construction Leadership Council's (CLC) update to its sector-wide skills plan for construction and the built environment. The Skills Plan is a cross industry collaboration.

One year on from CLC's first plan, the outlook for construction and the built environment is more positive. A range of indicators and forecasts are pointing to sustained growth in 2022/23 and in future years. But with growth comes greater skills challenges, CITB's Construction Skills Network forecasts are likely to show an annual need to recruit more than 50,000 workers above current trends.

Mark Reynolds, Group Chairman and Chief Executive of Mace and Sponsor for the People and Skills Network, said: "We can make fantastic progress if we get more parts of the industry involved in what we are seeking to accomplish. The new skills plan update will help us to achieve our goals by setting out where we want to be by the end of this year and outlining how our industry can get involved.

"This year's CLC plan includes improving awareness and take up of existing careers programmes, including supporting 3,000 employers to deliver Fairness, Inclusion and Respect sessions, securing 1,700 active Construction STEM Ambassadors and delivering 28,000 work experience taster sessions.

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"We will continue to work together in helping the apprenticeship system meet the industry's needs, with a focus on increasing apprenticeship starts and completions.

The CLC People and Skills Network, is Co-Chaired by CITB's Customer and Product Director Jackie Ducker. Jackie said: "The past year has demonstrated that we can achieve a lot more by working together across industry. Many of the actions that we have committed to are the still the right ones to meet the skills challenges that construction and the built environment faces. We are building on those actions now and strengthening our outcomes

"We launched the Construction Talent Retention Scheme (CTRS) successfully early in the pandemic, and helped to keep more of the people we needed by protecting those already in industry (including apprentices) at risk of redundancy.

"We piloted the UK's first occupational traineeship for construction with 93% of learners progressing to successful outcomes and transferred £2.3m of unspent Apprenticeship Levy via the Apprenticeship Levy Pledge Service, to smaller firms to invest in apprentices."

This year CLC is focussing its efforts around four strategic priorities with a spotlight on creating the right culture change and broadening diversity.

• Improving access to opportunities for all

• Boosting all routes into industry

• Ongoing collaboration to develop competence frameworks

• Preparing for the future of construction

Jackie added: We need to make construction an attractive career sector of choice through better development, delivery and showcasing of the career development opportunities our varied industry offers. This means supporting access for all by working with industry to develop a more equitable, diverse and inclusive industry culture.

There are plans to build on the successful occupational traineeship pilot by expanding into new priority occupations, supporting 200 learners through this route from Further Education into the construction sector. Talent View Construction will also be also promoted more widely with a 20% increase in employer uptake.

Another priority is to improve competence and embed higher levels of safety and quality in construction and the built environment by developing a set of competency frameworks.

Jackie Ducker and Mark Reynolds have expressed their thanks to the members of the network for their energy and hard work this year and look forward to working together to deliver the next stage of the plan in the coming year.