2007 salary survey

Isn’t it great to be working in regeneration? We have a prime minister dedicated to making our cities more economically competitive and our housing more accessible, mega-projects such as London’s King’s Cross Central in progress, we have a new generation of quangos in the form of city development companies and the prospect of local authorities expanding their remit and using their land, and then there is the raft of new legislation aimed at delivering physical transformation of our environment.

So are you happy? Well, the latest annual PSD Group/Regenerate Working in regeneration survey shows there are plenty of reasons to be cheerful, but also significant cause for concern. On the plus side, most of the senior executives of the developers, housing associations, local authorities and delivery agencies and quangos questioned for our survey believe the government’s attentions have made regeneration a more attractive sector in which to work. Most also believe our new prime minister will have a positive impact on the regeneration agenda, although the local authorities that could be making significant gains from Gordon Brown’s policies are curiously uncertain on this question.

But this isn’t feeding through positively to recruitment and the industry’s struggle to find personnel remains a cause for concern. This is the third annual survey carried out by PSD Group and Regenerate, and every year we report the same answer to the question: over the past year, has recruitment become more difficult?

It just gets more and more difficult. This year we asked the industry what its big challenges for the future were and, yes, you’ve guessed it, top of the list was the lack of experienced and qualified candidates.

While the local authorities surveyed simply wanted more surveyors and planners, preferably without hunting halfway round the world to get them, others had a more specific skills gap in mind: those in the private sector wanted to understand the public sector better and vice versa. Cara Downes, consultant in regeneration with PSD Group, says: “Survey respondents said some of the candidates coming forward lacked the ability to think across disciplines. They wanted to see more cross-sector career development and more interaction between the sectors, perhaps through work placements.”

While finding the right people keeps getting tougher, comparison of our 2007 and 2006 surveys indicates that many in the industry, particularly housing associations, are working harder to keep the people they have got. Last year, half of housing associations questioned said their staff turnover rate was more than 25%; this year 80% of the housing associations report a staff turnover rate of less than 25%.

Some of that turnaround may be due to the increasing trend for housing associations to pay bonuses to development staff, although bonus packages for housing associations are not yet featured in our salary charts. The salary charts on page 32 show that pay packages have improved marginally over the past year, but there are signs fierce competition in certain regions of the country may be driving up pay. In the North-west, for example, a private sector development director could expect a salary package of £110,000 last year, while his housing association counterpart earned an annual salary of £70,000. This year those figures have jumped to £120,000 and £85,000 respectively.

Money is still considered the most important way of attracting a potential job candidate by all but the quango executives, who rated the satisfaction of the job of delivering change as their number one draw. We asked respondents to rank a number of factors in their order of importance to their recruits. Perhaps tellingly, all put training and career development bottom of the list, behind pay, job satisfaction, interesting projects to work on and organisational culture.

This paints a somewhat contradictory picture of an industry that is desperately searching for well trained staff, but reckons that candidates do not value training. Is this the nub of the industry’s recruitment problem? It could be, says Downes. “Yes the bottom line for candidates is cash, but most will tell you that training is important to them. Often, they want to move job to broaden their experience.

“Businesses might be able to attract candidates better if they made more of the opportunity for recruits to broaden their experience and training and did not appear to be looking for a carbon copy development director or whatever. Businesses might well be missing a trick.”