This week, CIHT Chief Executive, Sue Percy CBE and Public Affairs Manager, Liberty Hibbard met with the Deputy Director of Analysis and Insight at Skills England, Frank Bowley, to discuss critical skills issues in the highways and transport sector.

Skills England works with partners to create better skills for better jobs, enabling growth and opportunity. Skills England is an UK Government agency, sponsored by the Department for Education.

CIHT highlighted findings from the CIHT Employment Trends Survey 2025, conducted across the highways and transport profession. With nearly 1,000 respondents, the report offers a benchmark of current industry confidence, talent flows, and future risks.

Sue Percy commented:

The transport sector is the glue that links housing, energy and the wider economy together, but without the right skills, we risk undermining that mission.

We look forward to working closely with Skills England to turn our survey insight into action.

CIHT highlighted several key areas to action:

• The Talent Landscape – a battle for talent is brewing with a static pool of available staff
•  Building Expertise & CPD – there is a need for more structured programme for staff development
• Net Zero and Environmental Confidence – a gloomy outlook on net zero means we need to turn ambition into action
• Artificial Intelligence and Technology – the sector needs to take advantage of AI tools
• UK Outlook - confidence in the UK government’s ability to deliver major infrastructure projects is low but there is some optimism at the personal and local level.
• Equality, Diversity and Inclusion – EDI has a vital role to lay in ensuring the success of the profession through diversity of thought and experience

CIHT emphasised the importance of strengthening non-degree routes into the sector, such as apprenticeships, in order to attract new, diverse talent into the industry.

However, Skills England acknowledged that highway specific apprenticeships remain limited and that employers in the sector can feel underrepresented in current reforms to occupational standards.

Additionally, Skills England currently focuses on the UK’s core industrial strategy sectors, transport infrastructure does not yet sit neatly within a single defined sector.

Plans are underway to introduce job plans for sectors over the next year, but CIHT highlighted concerns that highways and transport risk being “tacked on” to another sector’s plan, rather than fully recognised in its own right.

CIHT urged Skills England to help drive forward a coherent vision for workforce planning in highways, aligned with government infrastructure goals.

CIHT looks forward to continuing the dialogue with Skills England and looks forward to continuing to work with the Department for Transport and the wider UK Government to ensure that the UK's transport networks are fit for all our futures.