6 Tactics for Solving Your Skilled Worker Shortage

Written by LetsBuild

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Finding highly skilled workers in construction can be quite tricky sometimes. You have to be really careful, when you are conducting your research otherwise you may end up with people that can be dangerous for the conduction of your construction project per se.

However, there’s no reason to worry about it! Thanks to our years of experience on site and our thorough research, we managed to collect some truly useful advice for you. There are many different ways in which you can solve this problem. All you need is to invest enough time and money sometimes in order to find them.

First, though, we will quickly demonstrate why it’s so vital for a construction manager to find the right people for his/her project:

Safety

The number one reason why you need experienced construction workers by your site is, of course, safety. Working on a construction site can be by its own many times pretty risky, so there’s no need to make things even worse by hiring people who don’t know how to prepare themselves and their co-workers.

Time

I’m sure that you have heard that quite a lot, but time equals money. Even if you think that you save some financial resources by hiring someone inexperienced, you actually don’t. A worker that isn’t completely familiar yet with all the different tasks and processes that has to follow can hold your project back and result in significant profit losses. Take also into account, the time that you have to spend in order to train this person.

Team Cohesion

This may sound like a luxury to many people working within construction, but it surely isn’t. The more experienced workers are those that can keep the team together, when there are serious problems in the way. Now picture a construction team consisted only of newly graduates or inexperienced workers trying to sort out a serious crisis!

Training

We already wrote above that hiring unskilled workers could cost you a lot of time. On top of that, you have also to think about the training part. You have to find someone to train those people and to risk to some extent having your equipment damaged due to a human error.

FIND ALSO HERE: CONSTRUCTION MANAGER IS THE INDUSTRY’S UNCROWNED KING

Now that you have a better insight into why it’s critical to be surrounded by experienced workers, let’s see how you can manage to make it happen. We have prepared the following six tips for you:

1. Consider using off-site fabrication suppliers. This could drastically reduce the number of workers you require on site.

2. Take on apprentices. This needs some financial planning so that there is the cash to keep them on until they complete their skills training. It also needs them to learn to use the tools, not just brew-up for everyone else! Do that and they’ll be earning their keep long before their time is served! Down side is keeping a close eye on them until they get the idea of H&S on sites.

3. Employ Eastern European skilled tradesmen. Some of them are very good, but you would have to judge the individual. Again, a bit of a down-side to this if we are talking about an industry like the one in UK: – They have to be pretty fluent in English, particularly our construction “Grunt” vernacular. Some, such as electricians, have to get certified under UK schemes before they can undertake some aspects of their work.

4. Put a bit more work on the ones you have. But reward them generously for that! If you suffer a shortage of skilled workers to accelerate your project,  you could get more work out of your top performers. If they are on price- or piece-work they like that. More money coming in that pays for their family holidays! But sometimes this can difficult to be put on practice.

5. Put hands in pockets and pay for a competent, experienced Planner. They will come up with a Detailed Build Programme for you. With that you will know who is supposed to be doing what, where, when and what materials are required so they can get on with it! If the skilled tradesmen know this they usually get all excited, see an opportunity to earn even more and accelerate the project for you even faster!

6. Use a reliable construction management software, like GenieBelt. That will show the Detailed Build Programme to everyone involved and the skilled workers can just have a quick look at their tablet or smartphone to know what, where and when. They’ll even save the site management time by updating the progress on their task themselves.

Conclusion

Looking for skilled workers in construction can always be a great challenge, if you have to make your planning under a tight budget. That’s why, it’s critical to be inventive and try to find the most efficient way to go around it. There are many smart solutions, if you search hard enough and the use of GenieBelt could be one of them!