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SkillsPlanner: data for efficiency and growth

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SkillsPlanner’s planned use of linked and open data to collate construction skills supply and demand data fits with wider ambitions to make data a driver for economic growth and prosperity.

According to a recent RICS survey reported in the construction trade press (see this Construction Enquirer article, for example), skills shortages are hampering construction projects across the UK. With subcontractors facing rising wage bills, it is becoming more difficult for them to accurately forecast project costs, causing delays to project planning.

And this is not just a short-term problem. Significant skills gaps lasting into the next decade have been identified by research including the London Chamber of Commerce & Industry/KPMG 2014 report ‘Skills to Build’ (PDF here) and the September 2015 National Infrastructure Plan for Skills (PDF here). It is timely, therefore, that the Ethos-led and Innovate UK-funded SkillsPlanner research and development project is now well under way.

What is SkillsPlanner?

SkillsPlanner is an innovative, collaborative, data-powered approach to addressing construction industry skills shortages. Its ambition is to help ensure that the UK has the right people, with the right skills, in the right places, at the right time.

The two-year, £1.3m research and development programme, funded by Innovate UK and the project partners – Ethos, GoodPeople, Association of Colleges, Camden, Islington and Westminster councils, Seme4, Tideway, and University of Plymouth – is initially focused on the London construction sector. However, we intend to develop and expand the project across the UK in the coming months.

Building a data infrastructure

The Ethos-led partnership was successful in the IUK competition, ‘Solving Urban Challenges Through Data’, and was awarded a grant to conduct a Collaborative Research and Development project, which started formally on 1 October 2015. Further project collaborators providing contribution-in-kind include Crossrail and Greenwich council.

SkillsPlanner aims to help industry, employers, councils, trainers and, ultimately, individual workers to collaborate and share data to enable effective planning for future employment needs. It will be based on a cutting edge Linked and Open Data platform that can aggregate, integrate and analyse skills data from a variety of sources to provide a valuable ’real time’ picture of the skills landscape, mapping industry demand against current training provision.

It is particularly fitting that we are using data to supply construction skills fit for our future homes, buildings and other infrastructure.

Data: an “engine for growth and efficiency”

Our world is increasingly data-driven, and government and industry organisations are beginning to adapt to these changes – if we look again at construction, for example, there has been a strong push to get government projects delivered using data-centric building information modelling processes, mandatory from April 2016.

We are also encouraged by initiatives from the Open Data Institute, with whom we have close links – the ODI chairman and co-founder, Sir Nigel Shadbolt, is talking at our SkillsPlanner launch in London on 24 February, and also chairs Seme4, one of the SkillsPlanner partners. The ODI is urging government to consider data as infrastructure that is fundamental to the operation of a modern society and its economy. With the Royal Statistical Society, the ODI wrote an open letter to the chairman of the new UK Infrastructure Commission saying:

“We are not currently treating data as infrastructure. We are not giving it the same importance as our road, railway and energy networks were given in the industrial revolution and are still given now. We risk seeing data only as a tool for transparency when it should also be an engine of efficiency and growth.”

We like this ambition; it fits with Ethos’s culture and with our ambitions for SkillsPlanner. We want this data platform to harness the power of linked and open data and to be scalable and replicable across many industry sectors – improving the match of skills to jobs, reducing unemployment, increasing local labour supply, and enabling training provision to be responsive to industry needs. If we succeed in this mission, then data will be playing a key role in helping to boost our economy.

Adonis may have the body, but does he have a head for skills?

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Anyone with half an ear on the UK news over the last few days will know that George Osborne announced that he was investing further in, what he believes to be a critical area of concern for the UK economy – Infrastructure.

The Labour peer, Lord Adonis will be the chair of a new body called the National Infrastructure Commission. An initially confusing appointment as Lord Adonis is a staunch New Labour man but he is passionate about the fact that there must be alignment of planning, economic development and infrastructure as it’s critical not just to the country’s future prosperity but to social justice.

As John McTernan wrote in the Guardian recently: “Adonis knows that new roads, railways and power stations are not just projects in themselves; they are the engine of economic change. They take jobs to people, but they take people to jobs too.”

As Lord Adonis strives to ease the flow of new infrastructure projects through the system, he will be very aware of the huge skills shortages that blight the UK’s building industry. Research published by the Federation of Master Buildings in August 2015 suggests that two-thirds of small and medium construction firms have had to turn down work because they don’t have the staff to carry it out.

For five years Ethos has been creating sustainable solutions to complex challenges like the one facing the construction industry. Ethos is a network of social entrepreneurs and innovators who want to create better and more sustainable solutions to society’s biggest problems. They do this by putting people rather than corporations at the very heart of such challenges, and measure success by looking beyond the economic to consider impact on society and the environment.

So what better challenge for the company to step up to than matching clear and present desires for infrastructure growth to the availability of skills to deliver it?

Ethos’s most ambitious initiative yet, SkillsPlanner, is an innovative approach to solving skills shortages. SkillsPlanner is an internet platform that will allow stakeholders within the industry to share current and future skills supply and demand data, facilitating collaborative planning, training and brokerage to meet the industry’s requirements.

On the same day that George Osborne announced his re-inforced focus on the UK’s infrastructure, SkillsPlanner received final approval of £827k development funding from Innovate UK’s‘ Solving Urban Challenges with Data’ competition.

Ethos is collaborating with over 30 organisations on this initiative including core partners, the Association of Colleges, Camden Council, GoodPeople, Islington Council, Seme4, Tideway, Plymouth University, and Westminster Council.

Together with the ‘Linked Open Data’ technology leader and project partner Seme4, Ethos has launched a two-year £1.3m R&D project focussed on the London construction industry, which needs an estimated 180,000 new skilled entrants to deliver construction projects in the capital and the South East by 2019.

Key projects such as HS2, Tideway and Crossrail, planning authorities, main contractors, supply chains, training providers and industry bodies will share skills supply and demand data.

In simple terms this means that;

  • Skills and Training providers will be able to create demand-led courses and build capacity to know demand;
    • When asked for his comment, Martin Doel of the Association of Colleges said ‘Mastering data sources and being able to analyse this data in a timely manner will be essential for colleges to understand labour market needs and reconcile them with student demand,’
  • Construction companies will be able to benefit from more sustainable availability of local labour;
    • Louise Townsend, Sustainable Business Director at Morgan Sindall and Trudy Langton-Freeman, HR Business Partner at Costain, stated that ‘The skills shortage in the sector is rapidly becoming a serious impediment to the industry’s ability to deliver above and beyond what is expected of it. We must work together as an industry to define and predict the timely provision of these industry-critical skills.”
  • Local authorities will be able to collaborate on the design and delivery of local skills provision;
  • Local job brokerage initiatives will operate more efficiently and effectively.
    • Chris Dransfield of Crossrail sees great potential for SkillsPlanner to, ‘reduce brokerage costs and improve outcomes for all our stakeholders.’
    • There is even the opportunity to focus on future skills, so those needed for the far longer-term sustainability of the industry, as recognised by Alex MacLaren of BIM2050: ‘Highlighting the importance of understanding skills needs in the longer term, the collaborative premise of this new platform, harnessing available data to improve efficiency, awareness and reduce waste, is exactly the innovation we want to see in the future construction industry.’

I asked SkillsPlanner project director Rebecca Lovelace why she was so excited by this and she told us that ‘SkillsPlanner is an Ethos ‘perfect storm’. It demonstrates how a genuinely collaborative approach can create an economically viable solution to a complex urban challenge, resulting in a positive social outcome.’

With innovation like this happening alongside the Chancellor’s announced focus on the importance of the UK’s infrastructure and his appointment of Lord Adonis who has the energy and drive to see it through, maybe, just maybe this time it will work.

Let’s face it, to quote from George Osborne’s speech on the 5 Oct 2015, “Without big improvements to its transport and energy systems, Britain will grind to a halt”.

Let’s not let that happen for our children, families, friends and ourselves.

Ethos launches £1.3m collaborative solution to skills shortages

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SkillsPlanner Logo

Ethos’s most ambitious initiative yet, SkillsPlanner, an innovative approach to solving skills shortages, has been awarded £827k development funding from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency. SkillsPlanner is a data platform that will allow stakeholders within an industry or sector to share current and future employment needs, facilitating collaborative planning, training and brokerage to meet the industry’s requirements.

Ethos and project partners* secured the funding through the ‘Solving Urban Challenges with Data’ competition: SkillsPlanner is based on a powerful Linked Open Data platform, created by technology leader and project partner Seme4. It will launch with a two-year R&D project focussed on the London construction industry which needs an estimated 180,000 new skilled entrants to deliver construction projects in the capital and the South East by 2019. Ethos and its project partners will invest a total of £1.3m in this development phase.

Key projects such as HS2, Tideway and Crossrail, planning authorities including Westminster and Islington, main contractors, supply chains, training providers and industry bodies will share skills supply and demand data. The data will be integrated and linked to create a platform that enables:

  • skills providers to define existing provision and develop demand-led training
  • businesses to benefit from more sustainable procurement of local labour, reduced resource and HR costs
  • local authorities to collaborate on the design and delivery of local skills provision; and
  • local job brokerage initiatives to operate more efficiently and effectively.

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Key industry figures have pledged their support for the project.

In a joint statement, SkillsPlanner partners Louise Townsend, Sustainable Business Director at Morgan Sindall and Trudy Langton-Freeman, HR Business Partner at Costain, set out the case for a collaborative initiative: ‘The skills shortage in the sector is rapidly becoming a serious impediment to the industry’s ability to deliver above and beyond what is expected of it. We must work together as an industry to define and predict the timely provision of these industry-critical skills. SkillsPlanner provides a collaborative opportunity to do this.’

Chris Dransfield of Crossrail sees great potential for SkillsPlanner to, ‘reduce brokerage costs & improve outcomes for all our stakeholders.’

‘Mastering data sources and being able to analyse this data in a timely manner will be essential for colleges to understand labour market needs and reconcile them with student demand,’ says Martin Doel of the Association of Colleges.

Highlighting the importance of understanding skills needs in the longer term, Alex MacLaren of BIM2050 said, ‘the collaborative premise of this new platform, harnessing available data to improve efficiency, awareness and reduce waste, is exactly the innovation we want to see in the future construction industry.’

SkillsPlanner project director Rebecca Lovelace says: ‘SkillsPlanner is an Ethos ‘perfect storm’. It demonstrates how a genuinely collaborative approach can create an economically viable solution to a complex urban challenge, resulting in a positive social outcome.’

*Association of Colleges, Camden Council, Good People, Islington Council, Seme4, Tideway, Plymouth University, and Westminster Council.

SkillsPlanner is an inclusive and collaborative project. To find out more and get involved go to skillsplanner.net

Press contact Paul Wilkinson [email protected], 07788 445920, @EEPaul

About InnovateUK
Innovate UK is the UK’s innovation agency. It works with people, companies and partner organisations to find and drive the science and technology innovations that will grow the UK economy For further information visit www.innovateuk.gov.uk

 

SkillsPlanner: yesterday, today and tomorrow

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I had no idea when my construction journey started that I would one day be writing this: today we agreed a £1.3m initiative that has the most fundamental of aims, to connect those that are out of work with an industry full of opportunity, and to do so in the most collaborative means possible.

SkillsPlanner went live today. It is a data platform that will allow stakeholders within an industry or sector to share current and future employment needs, facilitating collaborative planning, training and brokerage to meet the industry’s requirements. We have over 30 organisations already involved and the premise is very simple: share your skills supply AND demand data, do so collaboratively using Open Linked Data (it’s not a database, nor a report that will sit on a shelf), and join other passionate people that want to build a platform that is for use by industry, by training providers, by councils and by job brokers.

SkillsPlanner will one day be free for individuals and it is being built today by those that will use it tomorrow – and in 2050.

Yes, it is a hugely ambitious project. But the reason I’m doing it is because this is one amazing industry, full of opportunity, and it is crying out for workers. But the workers aren’t being trained with the skills employers need. And everybody knows this. And the image of the industry is poor. And everybody knows this. And there are pockets of exceptionally good practice, that not enough people know about. But the industry is fragmented and the challenge is just oh, so big.

BUT if you can get the right passionate people around the table, telling us, for example, that data needs to be standardised to reflect competencies and qualifications, giving time to share their expertise and knowledge and working on this data collaboratively, then together we can do something amazing. We will build SkillsPlanner TOGETHER. We will spend time doing it properly, in collaboration with anyone that cares about those that are unemployed, about those being trained in the wrong areas, about an industry that could be so much more to so many more people.

Come and join us. We’re going to do something amazing.

Building a better built environment industry

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With collaborative platforms, mobile, BIM, ‘Big data’, the ‘internet of things’, we are tinkering with enablers of change. “Digital Built Britain” envisages entirely new business models for the industry currently known as construction.

21 years (and more) of industry reports

While some industry sectors have changed profoundly in recent decades, some have remained resistant to change. The UK construction industry, for example, has for decades been recognised as overly-complex, fragmented and price-fixated in its procurement approaches, adversarial in its supply chain relations, wasteful in its project execution, conservative in its adoption of new technologies, and short-termist and reactive in its approach to human skills development and R&D.

Such issues have been debated many times in a sequence of industry reports stretching back to World War 2: Simon, Emmerson, Banwell, Latham, Egan …. The ripples of the 1994 Report by Sir Michael Latham continue to be felt, not least because it stimulated some changes to procurement (we started to talk about strategic partnering and frameworks), and the change potential of IT was eventually picked up by Sir John Egan in his 2002 report Accelerating Change, and later championed by the first chief construction advisor, Paul Morrell from late 2009 onwards.

By this stage, the global financial crisis was scything through weak companies, projects were being moth-balled or cancelled altogether, thousands of workers lost their jobs, and the industry was desperate to find positive routes forward. Morrell responded to the challenge. Low Carbon Construction (2010) set the foundations, then the 2011 Government Construction Strategy instigated a more wide-ranging set of measures.

To many, this has all been about building information modelling (BIM), but it also created the conditions to test new models of construction procurement. Much of the endeavour, however, has remained siloed. To deliver the latest industry strategy (Construction 2025, published in 2013), we need to break down these silos, build on the progress made during the recession (lessons learned are being forgotten and businesses are ‘reverting to type’), and ensure they extend beyond just the progressive fringe.

‘Disruptive’ trends

The web, broadband and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) have all helped change perceptions about technology and information management (a once paper-centric industry is moving more online). Information mobility has been a factor since the advent of smartphones (c. 2007) and tablets (c. 2010). BIM has, of course, been an increasingly dominant theme over the past five years and is set to continue as the government’s 2016 mandate comes into effect; social media has – maybe somewhat grudgingly – begun to challenge existing models of communication; and we have also become more aware of the power of data – ‘Big data‘, interoperability, linked open data, and outputs from the ‘Internet of Things‘ (in short, some of us are no longer document-centric but data-centric).

However, these technological changes are not, on their own, going to overhaul the construction industry. They are, at best, enablers. We also have to tackle the existing siloed structures, attitudes, cultures and resulting behaviours within the industry. These are holding back business; they helped create the industry’s poor reputation, and this reputation makes construction less attractive to potential home-grown employees at a time when there are deep skills shortages and the existing workforce is ageing.

The future direction and shape of the industry currently known as construction is more likely to be influenced by political, economic, social, legal and environmental factors. Globalisation, carbon, population growth and resource shortages will have an increasingly important and direct bearing on what industry clients identify as desirable business outcomes, making them more alert to whole-life performance and to wider business, social, economic and sustainability outcomes.

New business models

New Business Models

Digital Built Britain, published in February 2015, is therefore a key document. It synthesises four industry strategies: Construction 2025, Information Economy, Smart Cities, Business & Professional Services; it tells a wider audience than construction that it needs to build and exploit a “new digital economy”. It talks about the need for:

  • New ways of doing things
  • New business models
  • New business relationships
  • New institutions
  • New performance metrics

This fits with the Ethos VO view and with Constructing Excellence’s vision which says delivering ‘best practice’ is not enough. The successful businesses of tomorrow will break through the current industry ceiling, making radical changes and building collaborative business relationships so they can deliver exceptional performance:

New Business Models

BIM, mobile and data are part of this picture but only as enablers. Over time, they will become normal – as much part of the way of doing things as CAD, spreadsheets and email. Supply chain organisations in the industry currently known as construction will be rationalised and more integrated, transformed into providers of leaner, safer, lower-carbon and data-supported “asset services” (delivering ‘illumination’, not light fittings, for example – “Buildings-as-a-Service”, BaaS perhaps), rewarded across the life-cycle for the value delivered by the built assets they create, and having the reputations and market valuations more commonly found among sophisticated manufacturers.

And workers will be rewarded for their value-adding contributions; many will be recruited and trained to apply their skills in off-site manufacturing facilities; there will be a more strategic and long-term view of employment supply and demand (managed through platforms such as Ethos’s SkillsPlanner project), and new professions will emerge as we start to exploit the rich data opportunities of Future Cities.

This is not achieved by focusing on technology – it is achieved by radically overhauling existing structures, processes and cultures, driving out waste, creating collaborative business relationships (both corporate and interpersonal) that nurture innovation, and having supply chains focus on what delivers best whole life value.