Is aspiration killing demolition?
Young people want the trappings that demolition and construction can deliver; but they want no part in creating them.
Is aspiration killing demolition and construction?
That feels like an absurd question. Aspiration is good, isn’t it? But as you’re about to hear, aspiration isn’t just elevation. Sometimes it’s distraction. We praise ambition, yet send it packing off to careers that glitter, careers that feel alive on a mobile phone or computer screen.
Meanwhile, jobs involving dirty hands and dirty boots remain unseen. And because of that, a vital industry fades from view. And fades from possibility.
Computer, phone, TV and movie screens are filled with images showing the allure of glamorous careers - footballers, singers, YouTubers, online influencers. But demolition and construction? These roles and these industries are invisible, hard to frame, lacking narrative.
When you can’t see it, you can’t aspire to it. And when you do occasionally see it, it’s hardly aspirational, is it?
Platforms like Instagram, YouTube and TikTok are filled with memes of demolition and construction gone awry. On site disasters. Machines turning over. People being hurt. Or displaying the kind of “banter” that generally involves someone being humiliated by his colleagues. On the rare occasions a young person does happen upon some form of demolition or construction content, it is likely to be enough to put them off for life. And herein lies the problem.
There’s a crisis in numbers. At this moment in Britain, more than 140,000 construction roles are open. By 2032, we’ll need nearly a million more workers including an extra 244,000 apprenticeships. That’s not some spurious figure based upon likely future workloads. That is just to stop the skills gap growing.
A third of our skilled workforce are set to retire by 2036. Meanwhile, housebuilding and infrastructure projects - 1.5 million homes by 2029, high-speed rail links, runway expansions - are all waiting. But the employment pipeline is dry.
Why wouldn’t a young person seize this opportunity? Well, for one thing, that opportunity comes clad in PPE and looks like hard work. But there’s another issue. The demolition and construction story is not told and it is not sold.
Although 68% of young people view construction positively, only 31% would even consider it as a career of choice; and nearly half said it wasn’t mentioned at all during careers talks. Careers advisors push university, office roles, office internships; clean, risk-free, tidy. Trades are described as dusty, dirty, almost exclusively male, physical, entry-level. All the nuance - the tech, the leadership, the sustainability, the autonomy - is left unspoken.
Yet the irony of irony: those same kids dreaming of sleek offices and influencer startups want exactly what construction delivers: a place to call their own, a driveway for their car, a home for their family. They might even fantasise about solar panels and smart systems, net-zero homes - aspirational items and an aspirational lifestyle made possible by the very sector many (most) of them overlook.
What if we reframed it? Show a kid at a career talk a clip of a site manager co-ordinating drones, BIM software, a big excavator operated vie remote control. Show another clip of a plumber installing a heat pump, talking green tech, net zero. We could show all the facets of demolition and construction that make it a potentially rewarding career path for young people. But we don’t. We let university and influencer culture have the stage, while our people toil backstage.
A few facts that sting: trades vacancies are at record highs; 55% of firms struggled to fill roles in late 2023, up from 29% just a year earlier. Women make up only 1% of bricklayers, 4% of trades overall; ethnic minorities only around 6%. We aren’t diverse. We aren’t visible.
And that, perhaps, is the greatest irony of all. The results of our work - the new homes, the new roads and the structures surgically removed from our skyline are all around us. Yet the people, the processes and the practices that make all those things possible are largely invisible. They’re not on TV. They’re not in movies. They’re rarely on social media. And, on the rare occasions they are, it is for all the wrong reasons: Incidents, accidents, corruption and failures.
Demolition and construction have allowed themselves to be sidelined; to be pushed off the front pages and to become a footnote; forced to live in the shadows cast by other seemingly more attractive, lucrative and aspirational career paths.
The endless demand for new houses, new office blocks, new roads, bridges and railways means that we have a constant flow of positive stories to tell. But, if we’re to attract more young people into the fold, we need to tell them far more proudly and far more loudly.