Delay retirement and relax visa rules to ease skills crisis

06 February 2008

Convincing transport professionals to postpone retirement and easing visa requirements to recruit more candidates from abroad are among the short-term solutions to the skills shortage recommended by industry figures.

The Institution of Highways and Transportation and an Institute of Civil Engineers report have both called for professionals to be retained beyond the state retirement age of 65.

Sue Stevens, IHT director of education, told Surveyor: ‘There’s so much demand, we need to think about keeping people on beyond retirement age.’

The Transport Planning Society and Association for Consultancy and Engineering want the Government to make it easier for non-EU nationals applying for transport and traffic to get jobs.

The calls underline the urgency of the situation where the median age for registered civil engineers was 55 in 2004, but local transport employers believe they cannot rely upon the education system to produce skilled young people to replace those retiring. This is despite the fact that there was a 45% increase in those enrolling on civil engineering degrees to 2006, followed by a further 10% rise in 2007 alone.

Joe Weiss, chair of the London Technical Advisors Group, told Surveyor that entry requirements for a civil engineering degree ‘are heart-rending, typically 3 Ds at A-Level’, while he suspected that the new 14-19 diploma in engineering would be ‘a lesser qualification’.

‘We’re talking about jobs where you’re dealing with people’s lives, millions of pounds of investment, and moulding the environment for the next century – are we producing people of the right calibre?’

The industry also believes that the supply of graduate civil engineers is ‘being eroded by recruitment directly from university into other professions,’ according to the ICE.

‘Given the level of demand, we need a creative approach,’ stressed Stevens. Despite the fact that the numbers enrolling on civil engineering undergraduate degrees has been increasing for five years, recent recruitment drives in London have failed to lure many. A graduate recruitment programme launched for London Councils’ ‘virtual agency,’ the BETTER Partnership, has to date in 2007/08 only given two students a job offer.
This led the BETTER Partnership to advise that the search for candidates ‘needs to be widened to non-engineering or transport-related degrees’. While the BETTER Partnership has, however, helped to increase the number of borough employees receiving training from Transport for London, Stevens said ‘growing your own engineers can only be part of the solution, it takes time’.

Even built environment employers in the private sector such as Halcrow and Skanska have been encouraging employees to work after retirement. Halcrow claimed use of post-retirement contracts ‘will grow’, according to the latest ICE State of the Nation report.

The TPS and ACE have also pressed the Government to rethink its tightening up of the visa requirements for transport planners and traffic engineers. ACE chief executive Nelson Ogunshakin accepted that lowering the work permit requirements was ‘not the only solution to the problem,’ but it ‘was at least part of the solution and will ensure the short-term viability of engineering firms’.

Would you postpone your retirement, given the skills shortage? Is recruiting professionals from abroad a sustainable solution? Share your experiences with Surveyor magazine. lc.baker@hgluk.com

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