Young, qualified and wanted, CM meets the in-demanders

CM meets seven Loughborough University graduates who found their decision to take construction degrees was expertly timed to fill impending skills gaps. Elaine Knutt reports. Photographs by Julian Anderson.

Meet the class of 2014, the cohort who made a commitment to construction in the gloomy climate of 2009/10 but are graduating under sunnier economic skies. With construction demand up along with employers’ need to resource it, our group of seven Loughborough University graduates already have six job contracts between them. But they start their careers aware that it wasn’t so easy for the year groups ahead of them, and that the industry is built on a fragile foundation of confidence and finance. 

So what are the Class of 2014 like? Our group of seven is split between two CIOB-accredited degree programmes: Construction Engineering Management (CEM) and Architectural Engineering and Design Management (AEDM). As a result, there’s a divide between those who see their next steps as being on site, experiencing the visceral thrill of seeing a project take shape and living every decision that goes into it, and those who plan to influence outcomes in a project’s pre-construction phase.

They’re able to take an informed view because all the graduates have already experienced the industry at first hand, through work placements and sponsorship arrangements. Loughborough’s CEM programme incorporates two six-month stints in a four-year CEM degree, whereas AEDM students can opt to take a year out in industry. Although £1,500-a-year sponsored places were harder to come by in the recession – only 50% of the CEM graduates were offered sponsorships from the start of their course – virtually all the students managed to secure them as their course progressed.

Loughborough prides itself on the close links it maintains between site and seminar room, which also helps make its graduates extremely employable. “We have strong links with the industry, and with graduates who are now working for major contractors, and our very strong employment rate sets us apart,” says Julian MacKenzie, CEM programme director. ”Employers shop at a number of other universities, but they value the product being produced here.” His AEDM colleague Mohamed Osmani adds: “They’re really good at making that link between site and what they’re learning. Our graduates are really prepared and confident about taking on tasks.”

Although our Class of 2014 is extremely clued up about the industry, it’s likely that even a less well-prepared group would be in demand. Employers are waking up to the fact that there are far fewer graduates leaving university than five years ago. In 2008, UCAS figures show that 4,465 full-time students were recruited onto building-related courses across the UK (including QS and building surveying degrees). By 2013, that number had fallen to 2,510. “There’s no doubt that the industry didn’t attract a lot of young people to do cognate degrees during the recession,” comments Tony Burton, the new chair of the Construction Industry Council.

But as demand picks up, Burton’s firm, Gardiner & Theobald, is recruiting more than 40 graduates this year, compared with 10 or 12 in the recession. Balfour Beatty’s Construction Services division will recruit around 90 graduates in September, roughly three times as many as entered the business in 2013. Willmott Dixon, meanwhile, is looking for 50 to 60 – roughly the same as in 2013. But although there haven’t yet been reports of companies failing to recruit the graduates they need, supply is likely to tighten in 2015-16.

“At our last accreditation group meeting [of university heads of department], everyone said there was likely to be a shortage of people with graduate level skills in two to three years. The numbers enrolling have dropped so employers are anticipating a difficult time,” agrees Ros Thorpe, head of education at the CIOB.

Maintaining links

With supply constrained, contractors are recognising that they can’t rely on future graduates knocking on their door. “We didn’t struggle this year, but we’re aware things could change next year, so it’s important to increase these links with people earlier in their course, offer work experience and make sure we have good links with the universities that provide us with good quality students,” says Claire Williams, group HR operations manager at Willmott Dixon.

Several other employers are taking similar precautionary measures. At Loughborough, staff report that contractors such as Bam, Kier and Morgan Sindall are striking informal “deals” to arrive on campus early, so they can talent-spot the best candidates. “As job prospects improve, employers will realise they will need to get involved earlier and not wait until the end of the graduate production line,” says MacKenzie.

Balfour Beatty is also planning to meet students earlier – perhaps in their first or second year – and then building up a relationship. But it’s also going a step further, putting its business-wide diversity agenda at the heart of graduate recruitment. “We’ve been working to identify universities with a higher-than-average representation of women and ethnic minorities and to make sure we have a presence there at careers fairs and then developing relationships,” says Meera Shah, senior emerging talent resourcing partner at Balfour Beatty.

But the UCAS figures given above flatter the picture of the university skills pipeline in the recession, because they omit the part-time students who rapidly disappeared from campuses once the £9,000-a-year fees doubled the recession’s whammy. According to the University of Salford and Robert Gordons University in Aberdeen, the withdrawal of part-time students, who made up around 30% of their intake, was a key factor in the closure or merger of courses. Salford combined a Construction Management and a Construction Project Management degree programme, and in 2010 Robert Gordons phased out a degree in Construction Design and Management.

Both universities report that full-time and part-time student recruitment is picking up. “Aberdeen had always been sheltered from the worst of the recession, but now we’re actually seeing growth,” says lecturer Rod McLennan MCIOB. However, for many employers, part-time fees of around £4,000 for five years looks like a poor deal.

Balfour Beatty, in fact, plans to switch resources from its part-time entry route to the new option of a “professional apprenticeship”. Established as part of the government’s trailblazer scheme for employer-defined apprenticeships, this would offer A-level students the option of earning, learning and reaching a professional qualification – CIOB, ICE, CIBSE, RICS or CIAT.

Balfour Beatty is hoping to recruit 30 post-A-level students to the programme in 2015 and sees this new recruitment stream as an important defence against the falling numbers of full-time students. “They won’t have all the skills of graduates when they start, but we expect them to be very capable even in their first two or three years of employment,” says Tony Ellender, emerging talent development manager.

The class of 2014 will be facing a more immediate challenge. Indeed, our group is going to be living in interesting times: they’re part of the generation of digital natives who will be delivering BIM-enabled projects, and will be entering management positions as the industry gets close to its Construction 2025. They will have the job of slashing carbon, shrinking project times and internationalising the industry. 

That said, they still embrace many of the traditions of the industry. Members of the Class of 2014 confess to carrying folders full of drawings out on site, to enjoying some old-fashioned crane-spotting and to struggling with 7am site starts. Plus ça change.

Meet the in-demanders

 

Chris Onions, who will join contractor Vinci after the summer, has already had a full immersion in the industry’s site culture. Over two six-month placements, he worked on several Vinci retail sites in the midlands, before being seconded to a team delivering a supermarket in south Wales. Living in a hotel with colleagues he enjoyed the social side of the industry, where personalities emerge from behind job titles and site roles.

But although Onions was clearly at home, he’s also looking forward to an industry that does things differently. His dissertation looked at the “circular economy”, in which components are recycled when a building reaches the end of its life. “In terms of sustainability, everyone is putting energy efficient stuff into buildings, but in the end, most of it will still just go to landfill,” he says. “It’s nowhere near solved. The demolition contractors get blamed for creating waste, but it’s the designers and specifiers that are creating the problem.”

The topic of the circular economy is only just being taken up by UK industry, which suggests his futurescope is functioning well. Onions is also an expert on the Construction 2025 targets and says he hopes to find a role linked to the challenges they set. And he’s pleased to be joining a contractor with global scope, pointing out that the wider Vinci Group operates in 100 countries. “We had a guest lecturer from Kazakhstan, and he said ‘get yourself out there; if you can work there, you can work anywhere’. I’d like to chuck myself in the deep end like that, but I’m not entirely sure where.”

The Class of 2014 knows no boundaries – and that’s how it should be.

 

Although she was originally drawn to architecture, Raneem Traboulssi says she’s found her calling in design management, explaining that its combination of applied creativity and getting-things-done practicality suits her personality. “I knew I wanted to do something in the built environment, but when I started the course I wasn’t sure I’d made the right move. But I always liked design, and found I liked the managing process – the combination.”

The AEDM course, she says, is effective at simulating the professional environment the students are about to enter. “The lecturer acts as a client and briefs you with their requirements, then you work in groups to deliver that.” One memorable “commission” was to design an enclosure for the “next-generation” prototype toilet that was the subject of a worldwide competition run by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Traboulssi, a Briton whose Lebanese parents subsequently moved to Bahrain, last year undertook a summer work placement there with contractor-developer Emaar where she worked alongside an architect designing a private villa.

Her experience of the Gulf state left her with a taste for the region’s can-do construction culture. “There’s always a building going up; it’s always dynamic. Of course, it’s easier to get planning permission there than in the UK, but I’d like to work there partly because I’d feel I could have more influence on the skyline than I do here.”

She now sees her future in project management or perhaps property development. And if the industry sometimes suffers from a collective insecurity complex over its appeal to young people, it can take comfort from Traboulssi’s view: “I always thought the status of being in the industry was good, that it offered fairly well-paid jobs.”

 

When he began his work placement with Vinci, the contractor that has  sponsored him since January 2011 and which he will now be joining, Peter Jenkin was taken aback by the long-hours culture. “At first, I wondered whether anyone else had a life – they certainly weren’t talking about it!” But once he realised he was dealing with professional dedication rather than social deficit, he relished the experience.

“I worked on projects worth £3m, £20m and £80m; I helped in closing off one project at Gatwick then on the set-up of another at Heathrow. Doing an industrial placement is so good, because whatever you do [after graduation], you’ve already settled in to working life,” he says.

But he also values the academic side of his Loughborough CEM degree. “Clearly the world we live in is changing very rapidly: technology and information and data are changing the way we live our lives. The course helps you to think about that. It helps you to deal with the unknown,” he says.

The 21 year old is clearly from the practical school of construction management – he was drawn to the subject after helping his father and brother on a self-build project. But he also comes across as a thinker and analyst. He discusses the forecast skills shortages on the nuclear new-build programme and other infrastructure projects (which are not overwhelming because of the overlaps in project timescales); Japanese contractors’ use of robotics; and the likely growth of India under its new government.

“I like looking at what’s happening beyond the UK, and in growing markets, how countries like India and China evolve and develop,” he says, adding that he’d like to work abroad with Vinci – “a truly global player”. If Vinci is looking for new talent to develop new markets, it’s likely that this combination of practicality and analysis could well be in demand.

 

Several of the group have international ambitions, but Hudson already has an international CV. For his placement, he applied to join students from other Loughborough departments who have benefited from its links with the University of Malaysia, which brokered a placement with hybrid contractor/developer Brunsfield. He spent three months in its design department, then worked on a high-rise residential block in the heart of Kuala Lumpur.

As you’d expect, it was something of a rite of passage. “Coming from university, it was a shock in itself, but being on the other side of the world was a massive culture shock,” he admits. But the Loughborough AEDM course, he says, was effective preparation. “I enjoyed the management side of the course, the logistics of getting all the different players in a project to work together. Working on design projects was very important preparation for going into the placement year.”

In Malaysia, he found himself switching between the Western approach to construction management and an Asian approach. “The relationship between labour and resources was different, so you might choose a different technique. Instead of prefab columns and beams you’d pour concrete insitu.”

Hudson says he’d like to work overseas in the future, so taking up a graduate traineeship with Willmott Dixon Energy Services – which is firmly UK-based – seems a slightly surprising choice. However, he sees its specialist field as very much the arena of the future, in any region of the world. “Sustainability is really an interesting topic. I did my dissertation on the Green Deal, so I read quite a lot around sustainability and the financing of it. But I definitely think that outside influences such as government and EU policy are key drivers – plcs are there to generate a profit and unless there are strong incentives, they can’t adapt or drive energy saving,” he argues.

 

Londoner Cara Morbey, 22, has spent three years at Loughborough as the only woman on the CEM course, although course leader Julian MacKenzie says her particular year group was something of a statistical anomaly and most have an intake of four or five in a group of 30.

Morbey had her eye on a construction career for a long time, after growing up visiting sites with her dad, who runs an SME contractor. But once she joins Lend Lease in the autumn, she’ll be single-handedly raising the average value of family projects considerably.

During her placement with the Australian developer, her experience of helping with a Ministry of Defence barracks provided the perfect linkage between classroom theory and site reality. “When I was there the project team had to work to cut costs – for the next MOD framework project they were given a lower target. In the classroom you’re taught about value engineering and how it should work, but it’s different seeing what they actually had to do. It was good to see in detail how it happened.”

However, she doesn’t think she’ll see the industry make a wholesale switch to offsite construction in her professional lifetime. “There’s the potential for everything to be completely different, but I can’t personally see it on a wide scale, just on selected jobs.”

Unusually, Morbey says she enjoyed her exposure to the projects’ legal underpinnings. “I got to see how the contracts were drawn up, and spoke to the people who were drafting them.”

As for her career path, she says she plans to continue on site, appreciating the immediacy and ever-changing context. But perhaps her heart lies in higher-value projects. “I’d like to do something high-spec, innovative and creative, in terms of new technologies going into the building and new ways of constructing it.” If that’s the case, she’s joining the right firm.

 

Daryl Moran took a diversion on a career path marked “architecture” and has never looked back.

He says: “I looked at some of the pure architecture courses, but then I came across AEDM and thought it would give me more options. I’m able to have influence on the design and I’m always working with architects, but the design manager is at the top of the table.”

On placement with Morgan Sindall, he acted as an assistant DM, “ticking off actions and looking at what people have and haven’t done”. The experience – which culminated in becoming acting DM on a primary school – confirmed his future. “I definitely see myself going back to that side of the industry; it’s the direction I want to go in,” he says.

He also appreciated the lack of status-seeking in the construction workplace. “The offices were laid out with no segregation or hierarchy – it was you, your boss and your boss’s boss. But it can be a bit daunting, you pick up the pace when your boss is sitting next to you!”

Like several of his fellow graduates, Moran is hopeful his career will span significant changes in construction practice. “I like the idea of BIM and moving away from some of the traditional project styles. One thing that struck me [on the placement] was the amount of paper and designs that people print. It should immensely cut down on the paper side.”

For his dissertation, he looked at the government’s 2019 deadline for zero carbon public buildings and the industry’s sluggish response. But he takes a perceptive view of how things will pan out. Speaking before the announcement of a “two-tier” zero carbon regime for housebuilders, he says: “It will be a serious challenge, but they haven’t defined what zero carbon will look like. It could be watered down until it’s feasible.”

 

Some people have to learn to manage construction projects, and some just seem to have the knack. Listening to Tom Shanahan describe his site placements at sponsor Morgan Sindall, it’s tempting to put him in the latter category. He enjoys the long, demanding but fulfilling days with their 5am starts; he relishes the sense that he has accomplished a client’s brief and confesses to a love of cranes, diggers and all things mechanical.

He’s even got a positive spin for an incident that would make many people question their career choice. One night he got a phone call from his boss at 2am. The client for an MTV studio regeneration in Camden, north London, was asking for someone to be go round to the site. Shanahan, who had in digs 16 miles away in Kingston, was the nearest. He got over there  at 5am. “After I’d done a 15-hour day the boss said I could shoot off. It felt like I’d accomplished something.”

Shanahan comes across as a natural fit with his chosen profession, but he says his confidence was boosted by his Morgan Sindall mentor. “He’d say things like ‘you’ve got to do this today’ and I’d think that’s just not possible. But at the end of the day I’d have done it, and he’d say, ’see?’” The biggest “see?” moment came when his mentor returned from holiday to find that all the project management tasks he’d delegated to Shanahan had been performed without a hitch.

His dissertation on heavy-lifting equipment seems to have been something of a labour of love. “When I was in London I’d see them from the train – I‘d be like ‘that’s a Jost’ or ‘that’s a Comansa!’” He even made a weekend trip to a Morgan Sindall site to see the erection of an oversized crane to lift 10-tonne prefab units for a student accommodation project. “I thought I might as well go and see it being done before I had to do it myself!” Didn’t we say he was a natural?