Employers

Inspire and nurture the city’s young people to ensure the future resourcing of the Built Environment sector.

“A lack of skilled workers across the sector remains an issue in the Midlands construction market, according to new research. The RICS Construction Market Survey, covering the final quarter of 2016, suggests skill shortages were the most notable across the Midlands in this period. This quarter, 75 per cent of respondents highlighted this to be an issue – the highest figure since 2007, the report said.” Birmingham Post, 6 February 2017

However…

“House builder Redrow surveyed 2,000 parents and school-age children and 147 of its own apprentices ahead of National Apprenticeship Week and found that 50% of young people questioned answered “no” when asked if information on careers in construction had ever been discussed with them verbally by a teacher or had been made readily available in careers literature.” Construction Manager, 6 March 2017

The continued prosperity and growth of the sector will rely on inspiring and nurturing young people currently studying in the city’s schools to think about careers in the professional sector.

Now is the time to be doing this.

It is vital that the sector works in partnership with the city’s education providers to not only promote the opportunities of the future but to ensure they are skilled to take advantage.

BESS has created a week long series of events that are aimed at 13 to 19 year old students resident in the city’s schools to engage and excite them about the future opportunities to be discovered in the sector.

We are now actively seeking hosts and volunteers from the Built Environment sector for CCW 2017.

There are numerous ways in which you can get involved:

  • Existing resources – if your organisation already undertakes outreach/school engagement activity that could form part of the week, we’d love to hear about it. For example, do you run sessions on financial literacy? Do you speak about your work to students? Do you engage with schools as part of your CSR strategy; do you offer work placements to schools?
  • Volunteers & hosting – can you offer members of your team to visit and run activities within a school during the week? Similarly, as part of the week’s activities we will be conducting business walks around the City’s Colmore Business District, so we are looking for students to visit businesses to hear about what they do. Taking a tour of your firm and gaining first hand experience of the environment of a built environment business would be invaluable. This will be an experience that has not been available to many of the schools we are targeting and will help in our aim to demystify the sector.
  • Sponsor transportation – school budgets are tight and Construction Careers Week, no matter how rich in content or well intentioned, will have little impact if we cannot transport students to the host organisations. As such we are asking businesses help make this happen by donating £500 to sponsor transport for a school and cover some of the other associated costs of the project.
  • Sponsor Construction Careers Week – the whole week is being delivered by BESS as part of the Birmingham Enterprise Adviser Network, which requires match-funding from industry to support the Government contribution provided by Careers & Enterprise Company. We also have sponsorship packages available, which offer brand awareness raising opportunities that could be of interest if you would like to have greater affiliation and association with the project. More details are available upon request.

Register your organisation here