2008 Recession Essay

The 2008 recession was the tipping point with regards to the UK construction industry’s skills shortage (Sullivan & Paton,2015). Years leading up to the recession had highlighted the unresolved issue that there was a lack of skilled trade workers entering in the sector which peaked during the 2008 recession. The result was that many workers who were laid off, never to return to the sector. Bruce Boughton, people development manager at Lovell Partnership, emphasises this, saying:
"Before the recession, you had staff who had been working for 10 or 20 years. As many of them were laid off, there was a big shortage of experience on workforces” (Roberts, 2014).
The knock-on effect of this was that there were insufficient numbers of trade workers

Historically, production from the UK construction industry has always been poorer than the rest of the UK economy (As shown in figure 2.1). National Building Specification (NBS), a leader and advocator of digitalising the construction industry, have highlighted that the sector has not seen any significant growth in productivity in the last 20 years (RIBA, 2014), and as figure 2.1 emphasises the recession of 2008 hit the industry far harder than other sectors in the

This was particularly evident in self-employed workmen where lack of training and development drove up the number of self-employed tradespersons who faced an ‘earn or learn’ dilemma (Only 27% of businesses in wider construction said they had a training plan and 19% had a training budget (UK Government, 2013). This was because they had the choice of either working to keep their company in business or reducing their income to conduct training where they risked of putting themselves out of