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Measures are being taken by government to make the building industry attractive to the youth. Image: leadingarchitecture. co. za
The strong focus of the Expanded Public Works Programme( EPWP) on labour intensive construction also places additional demand for qualified supervisors and managers.
In a report to address the skills shortage, the Department of Public works says that skills development has always lagged behind increases in construction spend due to graduating rates in construction and engineering.“ The current growth phase requires substantive interventions involving a wide range of stakeholders, because the current growth in infrastructure investment has come on the back of lows in the industry that have not been experienced for decades; labour practices of the past decade have resulted in fundamental structural changes favouring labour brokering, resulting in declining investments in skills development; and there have been fundamental changes, and breakdowns, in the skills-supply pipeline,” the report says.
From a demand perspective, the Construction Industry Development Board( cidb) first investigated the likely level of infrastructure investment, from which it concluded that the growth in infrastructure investments is likely to be around 10 % to 15 % a year over the next five years.
The investigation then assessed the skills requirements of different project types, including building, minerals processing, bulk earthworks, roads and stormwater and water and sanitation. It applied these profiles to understand the skills demands in the building and civil engineering sectors and indicated that, if demand in these sectors were to reach a projected 10 % growth rate over a five-year period, the following demand for skills was obtained: for key management, supervisory and engineering personnel: less than 200 in most categories over a five-year period; while for key artisans; between two to three thousand in the most populous categories over a five-year period.
SHORT AND MEDIUM TERM CHALLENGES
Challenges relating to the skills pipeline cut across the education, training and workplace arenas. The problem is not merely to equip new entrants with skills, but to ensure that they gain the appropriate workplace experience to consolidate their craftsmanship, supervisory and professional capabilities. A further challenge is the predominance of an aging skills population which needs to be replaced without compromising quality and performance.
Addressing the skills pipeline will require significant changes in the current system of education and training to ensure that graduates( whether artisans, technicians or technologists) are able to meet world-class standards of performance.
In the short term, a number of immediate challenges exist in the sourcing of particular expertise to ensure that infrastructure projects, and in particular certain megaprojects( primarily in the public corporation sector), are rolled out as planned.
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MARCH- APRIL 2017
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