Britain’s approach to training young people tends to give students “just one shot” at academic success and does not always allow those who “did not get it right first time” to continue their learning, according to High Speed 2’s supply chain manager Scott-James Eley. “Some colleges and employers are fantastic,” he added, “but they are in the minority.”

Scott-James was speaking at a skills roundtable discussion, hosted by CIHT last week in London, featuring 16 sector leaders representing contractors, consultants, academia and professional institutions.

He said that the current education system is ripe for someone new to come in and change how things are done, much like Uber has altered the way many people use private hire vehicles.

And he added that a lack of parity between vocational, technical and academic courses must be addressed so that the industry can help to shape the future workforce and give people more chances to learn new skills.

Greenwich University’s senior lecturer Deborah Sims FCIHT (pictured) agreed. “We put all these hoops and barriers in people’s way by saying they have to have the right GCSE and A level results, go to university for three years and then sit three hour exams. But if you are not the sort of person that is able to do that you are going to drop out.”

The sector needs, she added, to develop some sort of “safety net, that allows us to pick people up so that we can say ‘university might not be for you, but we still want you’.

“I would say to employers that they need to take more notice of students’ final year presentations before selecting work candidates. Exam grades don’t tell you the whole story.”

Other participants at the roundtable included AECOM’s managing director of transportation Paul McCormick FCIHT. “Engineering companies are generally still struggling from the pain of the last recession when lots of people were leaving the industry and many companies were not recruiting new people,” he said.

“That has led to shortages of principal engineers and senior project directors and that could be a problem as we approach a huge pipeline of work towards the latter half of next year in the UK.”

Bechtel Infrastructure’s manager of talent acquisition Paul Oatham told the roundtable: “For some roles it is not enough for someone to be a project manager or an electrical engineer but they need to have big infrastructure project experience. The trouble is that pool of people is not growing quickly enough.”

BAM Nuttall's chief executive Steve Fox said that the industry is not attracting enough young people leaving school and that the sector does not use its people in the most efficient manner. “The industry is hugely inefficient with up to three times as many people managing jobs today than when I started out in the industry. We have an obsession with bureaucratic approaches and man mark all over the place.”

He added that construction sites have not changed much in 35 years compared to how, for instance, the car manufacturing operation has. “We are still laying bricks, in the mud and have low barriers to entry. We need a different approach to change the skills profile and attract those for whom jobs and skills will be vastly different in the future.”

CIHT chief executive Sue Percy said: “We have got to make big steps forward on skills otherwise people from other sectors will come into our space. We need to move forward in this area quicker than we have done in the last 30 years.”

A feature from the roundtable will appear in the January issue of Transportation Professional, published in the New Year.

(Photo: Scott Ramsey Photography)