When young talent is missing - the skills shortage in the construction industry

Whether bricklayer, tinsmith or road builder - they all face the same problem: young talent is missing. According to the Swiss Master Builders Association (SBV), the proportion of people over 50 working in construction is more than a third. Put differently, that means that by 2030 a third of those employed in the main construction sector will take (early) retirement. When these large post-war birth cohorts, the so-called baby boomers, leave the labour market, a large gap will open up in the construction industry.

Training qualified young skilled workers has been a pressing concern for years - and is becoming ever more urgent. The construction trade is among the sectors in which, in percentage terms, the most apprenticeship places have remained unfilled in recent years. Even though the cohorts now coming through are small, which is one reason for many unfilled apprenticeship places, that does not yet explain the explicitly low apprentice numbers compared with other sectors. And there is not only a shortage of staff, but above all of qualified staff. A study by the Swiss Observatory for Vocational Education and Training shows that 20 to 25 per cent of all apprenticeship contracts are terminated early - with the construction trade lying above even this average. So by no means all apprentices who begin their training also complete it and ultimately work successfully in their trade.

The cause of the low interest among the younger generation in learning a construction trade is probably the still unpopular image of the job. The clichés of the construction worker toiling in heat and cold for low pay with no opportunities for further professional training are evidently persistent. The young generation sees too little of its professional wishes and expectations - part-time work, modern technologies and varied, challenging areas of responsibility - realised here. To what extent this image still corresponds to reality today is questionable, and the way these topics are handled also differs greatly between individual companies.

One thing is certain, however: the construction industry has to show itself to be progressive and innovative in order to win over the younger generation. Part-time working models and the increasing use of digital technologies - which on the one hand make work more effective and on the other create new, technically more demanding and more varied requirements in construction jobs - could considerably enhance the image of the trade. Beyond that, this would open up a further possibility: specifically appealing to women to enter construction trades. While in some areas of construction, such as landscaping, women often already make up half of the apprentices, in other areas, for example road construction, they are represented only very rarely. Alongside part-time working models and technical aids that contribute to physically less strenuous work, the image of the construction trade as a typically male domain also has to be tackled in order to recruit women successfully. Events at which girls can get an unprejudiced taste of construction trades are therefore extremely valuable in shaping a gender-independent picture of the profession from an early age. Beyond that, the culture of interaction in training and in the construction business itself is of course a decisive criterion.

In summary it can be said that the construction industry will have to undergo change in the near future. Since the topics of «women», «part-time working models» and «digitalisation» play a decisive role in construction trades, we would like to look at these more closely in the coming weeks.