Graduates working in construction will leave the sector if it enters a prolonged period of recession, warns industry organisation CITB-ConstructionSkills.
The government needs to learn from past recessions and ensure that highly skilled graduates are not lost to the construction industry as a result of cutbacks to public spending, according to CITB-ConstructionSkills, the industry training board and sector skills council responsible for overseeing standards in the workforce.
CITB-ConstructionSkills warned that in previous recessions highly skilled and graduate workers who left the industry did not return once a recovery was under way. It fears that chronic skills shortages could damage the industry’s ability to contribute to the UK economy for years to come.
The sector skills council was responding to new figures from the Construction Skills Network (CSN), which suggested that planned cuts to high-profile projects announced by the government in recent weeks, including the Building Schools for the Future programme, risked plunging the construction industry back into recession.
In January this year the CSN predicted that the industry would begin to make a slow recovery and forecast a further 38,000 job losses. However, it has now revised these figures in the light of planned public spending cuts and predicts that a further 68,000 jobs are at risk from 2011 to 2015, while the number of places available for apprentices and graduates will also be under threat.
Judy Lowe, deputy chairman of ConstructionSkills, said the projected job losses resulting from cutbacks to public building programmes made for ‘bleak reading’. She said, ‘What we’d prefer, is to work with government to make sure that public sector programmes are procured more cost-effectively.’
Posted by Alison_TARGETjobs on 4 August 2010
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nthatch61, 02 November 2010, 14.00 pm“I am a mature graduate and have recently (August) been laid off. Finding work at the moment is extremely difficult and because I have a mortgage to finance, I am now looking beyond the building surveying / construction fields just so I can bring some money into the household. It looks like my 'change of career' was a complete waste of time - and money. Very demoralised !”