The government’s plan to “value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap” is the right ambition, says Phil Scott, vice president of technology delivery at NBS. But he also maintains new training pathways won’t close the construction skills gap on their own
The new prime minister’s welcome announcement on new routes to technical education has reopened a question our industry has been circling for years. How do we get young people into skilled, productive work, and not just qualified on paper?
From September 2028, students will be able to access high-quality technical education early, with built-in employer contact. Construction sits on the list of priority sectors for this new scheme. “Britain will value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap,” the government has said. The sentiment is welcome; it’s also long overdue.
A million young people, and a sector ready to embrace them
Here’s why it matters. More than a million 16 to 24-year-olds are currently not in education, employment or training. These are the so-called ‘NEETS’. Alan Milburn, chair of the Social Mobility Foundation, has warned of a lost generation. Construction is one of the sectors best placed to welcome that talent and potential; provided we engage with young people early and give them something real to work on.
Why the classroom can only take you so far
I speak from experience, having started at NBS as an apprentice. That early exposure to how the industry actually works shaped everything that followed for me. In my view, you learn things on the job that no lesson plan can teach; from how a specification holds up under pressure to how a product decision ripples through a project several months later. A classroom can go some way toward preparing you for the reality of a building site. It can’t stand in for it.
This is where I’d offer a note of caution. The policy creates new paths that lead to technical careers. Yet it does not, on its own, create the workflows, live data, and employer relationships needed to turn a curious teenager into a capable professional. That part is on us. If the construction sector treats the September 2028 deadline for rolling out technical education pathways as ‘job done’, we’ll have built a better front door and left the rooms behind it empty.
The appetite is already there
Encouragingly, our research back in 2022 found that 56% of 18- to 29-year-olds saw construction as an attractive career. Half of young women said they were interested, a sharp rise from previous years. Three years on, and before this reform has taken effect, that interest is a good starting point. Yet youthful enthusiasm can fade fast when it meets a wall of outdated attitudes or a training route that feels disconnected from the actual work.
What real experience looks like in the real world
So, what does connecting young people to real work look like in practice? At NBS, we’ve seen what happens when students get their hands on live, industry-standard specification data while they’re still learning. Through our work with universities and professional development programmes, we put the same tools used across the profession in front of the next generation of architects, engineers and designers, using current product data from day one. This means they graduate having already done a version of the job, not just reading about it.
That’s one contribution to a much bigger problem, and I’d never pretend otherwise. Closing a skills gap this wide will demand a lot from all of us. Employers will need to open their doors, offer mentoring, provide work placements and treat young people as future colleagues. The government has done its part by putting construction front and centre. The harder work for our sector starts now.
The bottom line
Young people who get involved early on tend to stick around. That’s the bit a policy can’t do for us. If the industry opens its doors now, offers proper placements and lets young people see what the job is really like, we will fill the construction skills gap. If we wait for September 2028 to sort things out, we’ll have missed the point, and our moment.
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