There's a skills shortage in the industry, which I think is a bit of a misnomer, when
we say there’s a skills shortage, there isn't a skills shortage, the skills are there,
we have young people who have these skills who have the aptitude for being good in the
construction industry, but we're not honing those skills.
Land Surveying as a profession is very important, at the end of the day, before we can build
anything we need to know what's there, and when we have designed it we need to know where
it goes. It’s all well and good to design The Shard, but if we don’t know where we're
going to put The Shard, we're going to end up putting it in somebody else’s back garden
and they’re going to be pretty unhappy about that.
So, it’s very important that we know exactly what we've got out in the field before we
even consider designing up a project or a scheme.
The Design, Engineer, Construct! programme (known as the DEC programme), goes into schools and
allows kids to look at what surveying can offer and the career prospects that it can
bring. The programme is supported by Topcon, who are a major manufacturer in surveying equipment,
they've supported it for many years and it’s great to see somebody as big as them
backing DEC.
What Design, Engineer, Construct! has helped with is getting that skillset, which we're
losing, its going somewhere but not into construction, and these young people are now using the skills
that they’ve got and bringing it into the industry that we need, and it’s an industry
we need going forward, everyday we're using roads we're using buildings which need to
be built, need to be designed by someone. In the future, who's going to do that? the
students from Design, Engineer, Construct!
There’s probably two main challenges, I’d say the first one is the teachers’ subject
knowledge, it was a steep learning curve, I had a lot of learning to do and that’s where
the industry adopters came in, people like Topcon who have provided that industry support
and knowledge that I was lacking.
The second thing is changing people’s misconceptions about exactly what the construction industry
was. The parents especially.
You look at where we are now, we have parents that are really pushing the children to come
and take Design, Engineer, Construct! Level 2 and Level 3 because they know all of the
success stories we’ve had with past students and we’ve got a real steady stream of students
now that are going into the industry, we’ve got the first Land Surveyor, Stephen, who's
just been taken on by Jacobs as an apprentice.
Because I’d never done land surveying before I wanted to see how it was, so I did it for
five days, I really enjoyed it and then I asked my teacher "what else can I do?" he got
me involved with Jacobs and a couple of different companies and I’ve landed the job at Jacobs.
In the two years we’ve covered everything, so we started from the ground up and it’s
like we are actually designing the building and making it. It's been one of my favourite
subjects since I’ve been in it, so it’s been really interesting, it’s kind of something
new that I didn’t do in high school so jumping straight into it was really fun and enjoyable.
So, for many years the industry has said "we’ve got a skills gap, we haven’t
got engineers coming through, we haven’t got surveyors coming through" and they’ve
done nothing about it, well Design, Engineer, Construct! is addressing that issue. It can’t
do it on its own, it needs people from the industry, whether they be surveyors, whether
they be Tier 1 contractors, whether they be construction professionals from any level
within the industry, they need to come on board and help these students develop into
what we need as an industry going forward. It’s all very well complaining about a
problem, if you don’t do anything about it that problem is going to persist for many years to come.
We have the talent in the UK to fill the skills gap, but we need to nurture
that talent and mould it into what we need for the future.
I most enjoy the day-to-day work of surveying, so you're in the office or you’re outside
the office, you can travel all over, you look at a design that’s been put on paper and
then you transfer to an actual physical, construction project. Once its complete and you step back,
and you think "look at what we’ve done, look at what we’ve achieved" and it’s really rewarding.
The partnership with Design, Engineer, Construct!
made perfect sense. From a personal development
point of view, Topcon have always helped us develop and be the best that we can, there
is no limit to where you can go within Topcon as an organisation and that philosophy hands
over to our assistance with Design, Engineer, Construct! We believe the same of the young
people coming forward, we don’t believe in ceilings, we believe that any one of the
students who take up the Design, Engineer, Construct! programme are our engineers of tomorrow,
they are our Brunel's of the 21st century.