Blog: SECBE Awards 2022 finalist - Building People

01 April 2022

Equality, Diversity & Inclusion sponsored by Faithful + Gould

Building People 

EDI Constructing Excellence SECBE Awards 2022 Finalist

Building People has a holistic and truly collaborative approach towards enabling a more equal, diverse and inclusive built environment workforce. Its commitment is to bring people and organisations together to enable change, and to practically address the social challenges of skills, diversity and social impact. The key problem that the company seeks to resolve is: The UK needs to build, there aren’t enough skilled workers, and the existing workforce does not reflect UK society.

The statistics are alarming, with under 2% of women working in the trades, 5.4% Black Asian and Minority Ethnic workers, 22% of the current workforce over 50 and 15% in their 60s, and only 12% of those working in construction aged between 16-24. In contrast, 79% of construction businesses are struggling to recruit staff, with output expected to grow at an average rate of 4.4% across 2021-2025, meaning that construction will need to recruit an extra 217,000 workers, or over 43,000 per year.

Building People is a winning organisation because its vision is ambitious, the reach is exceptional and the commitment is genuine. Collaboration and not duplicating effort is at Building People's core and it has succeeded in bringing together supply and demand around the common challenges of fragmentation, skills shortages, diversity and social value.

Building People's vision is of a sector that improves social and economic value by being better connected and more diverse and inclusive, with access to the talent it needs to solve its current and future challenges. Its mission is to create connections between people, needs and opportunities, and to enable practical collaboration on equality, diversity and inclusion best practice, so that diverse people and organisations can thrive in the built environment.

Since commencing activity in 2018 Building People has developed a free-to-use platform that aggregates and integrates with industry-wide activity, enabling people to find employers, opportunities and resources, and employers to connect with a more diverse range of talent. We are simplifying user journeys and providing equality of opportunity across a fragmented careers landscape by enabling organisations to share – to share vacancies, events and resources, which we then connect to our network of providers of built environment careers support to under-represented audiences.

Key achievements:

• Growing our ‘Communities’ network to over 45 members – see here.

• Developing a free-to-use ‘aggregating and connecting’ platform that simplifies the user journey and enables equality of opportunity across a fragmented careers landscape (people can more easily find what already exists and opportunities are connected to organisations that work with under-represented audiences) – see here.

• Bringing our network together to publish a response to the Construction Leadership Council’s Skills Plan (giving a voice to the small organisations that deliver such vital work in the equality, diversity and inclusion, and skills space, yet are not formally supported at the top of the sector by the bigger players) – see here.

Find out who wins at the Constructing Excellence SECBE Awards 2022 Ceremony on Thurs 30th June 2022.

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About the Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (sponsored by Faithful + Gould ): 

Construction clients have an important role to play in transforming the way the industry operates.  How projects come to market has a significant impact on the ability of the construction industry to provide innovative, whole life value-for-money solutions. More info.

>> Find out more about the other Constructing Excellence SECBE Awards finalists here