George Barker attended a panel discussion on the challenges in highways recruitment, which provided some practical suggestions as well as wider insights into the state of the 'infrastructure world'.

The key message from a recent lively debate on highways recruitment in Birmingham was that the sector had to act, best exemplified by IHE president Darren Capes' call for the sector to explore alternative routes to attract new staff and tackle the industry's skills shortage.

Speaking to Highways, Mr Capes said that it was ‘essential' that companies look at other recruiting pools outside of typical university graduates, including recruiting from the military or via the use of prison day-release schemes.

‘I think it's essential that we become more diverse in where we attract people from,' he told Highways. ‘I think there are lots of people doing jobs that aren't as attractive as working in highways. They probably don't realise that. And I think there are other sectors that are better at working with military levers, people leaving the penal system. All those opportunities that we don't do well enough with.'

His comments followed a panel discussion, which explored ways to address the highways skills gap. Mr Capes was joined on the panel by David Langford, director of highways, transport and waste management, Nottinghamshire County Council, Sue Percy, CEO of the CIHT, James Chambers, director of business development at Bluebeam, David Ogden, chair of PIARC and Rachel Keane, chief data inspirer at Data Inspiration Group.

The discussion was chaired by Andres Martell, head of future transport at Connected Places Catapult.

Fighting back in the war for talent

The panel agreed that more attention was needed on other routes into the sector, with all of them stating that recruiting needed to look at other skill sets and qualifications other than engineering or other more traditional routes into highways.

Panel members argued there should be a focus on recruiting those interested in data sciences, given the increased prevalence of AI in the sector and an increasing reliance on and need for accurate and useful data.

Ms Keane founded the Data Inspiration Group with that goal in mind as a way to give students problem-solving and data literacy skills to prepare them for future careers in data-driven industries – something which highways is rapidly becoming, she suggested.

However, Mr Langford suggested the focus should be more directed towards the ‘front-line coal face workers'.

‘Everything that me and my teams do,' he explained, ‘culminates in somebody holding a physical tool or operating machinery, and they are by far the largest portion of our workforce.'

He added: ‘Our big challenge, though, is that we are losing the war [for] talent, particularly with the younger generations that are ‘digital natives'. They have grown up with the expectation that they will be put on a computer, rather than on a shovel, or on a piece of machinery. So how do we create a compelling career proposition for us, that means that we're a career of choice, rather than think they fall into when they can't get their first choice.'

Another area in which the panel agreed the sector could improve was in retention of staff.

Interestingly, two members of the panel – Mr Chambers and Mr Langford – had both started their highways careers in the UK and then moved to the USA and New Zealand, respectively.

When asked if there was something that other countries were doing in the sector that the UK wasn't, Mr Capes was cautiously optimistic.

‘Sometimes it's easy to overstate the problems, and I actually think that people moving abroad is healthy, as long as at some point they move back again. We shouldn't worry too much about that. I think there's a thing about how we attract people to come into the UK to work in the sector. I think in the UK, thinking about how the professional institutions work, we do that probably as well as anywhere in the world, and I think there are lots of parts of the world that would really respect the UK way of training engineers.'

He added that, rather than trying to compete with other countries, there was an opportunity for the UK to work with them.

‘We have a real opportunity, across the different professional institutions, to work in other countries. I think you've got to remember, there are lots of countries now where people are designing and specifying UK schemes. There are lots of international consultancies that do a lot of design work for the UK in other parts of the world. So there are lots of people working to UK standards, designing UK infrastructure, that we should be working with to accredit as UK engineers.'