The missing managers

The CIOB’s latest survey highlights an increasingly scarce construction commodity: you. Of 623 people who took part in an online poll, 76% reported that they had found it very or quite difficult to recruit senior or middle managers in 2006.

Respondents, 96% of which were CIOB members with 60% working in firms employing more than 200 people, said that finding tradespeople was also difficult: 36% said it had been very difficult to recruit them and 52% said it had been quite difficult.

The survey also tried to gauge where overseas workers were plugging the gaps. A total of 93% thought that foreigners were very or quite common among labourers, 89% among semi-skilled and 82% among trade. Just 20% said foreign supervisors were quite common with numbers reducing higher up the management ranks: 12% thought foreign junior managers were quite common, 5% middle managers and only 1% foreign senior managers.

Commenting on the results, CIOB’s deputy chief executive, Michael Brown, said the shortage of managers was of greatest concern to the CIOB because shortages in the trades could be met relatively easily by foreign workers. “The higher you go up the management levels, the more difficult it is,” says Brown. “Clearly this does raise continuing issues that are going to get more difficult rather than easier.”

The results highlight how important it is to hang on to your good senior and middle managers. But in the current market this is very difficult.

Wilmott Dixon’s personnel director Chrissie Chadney says poaching is rife. Managers are often offered £5,000-£10,000 above their current salaries with estimators and QSs in particularly short supply. “Even people who are pretty loyal to the company, if they are at a certain stage in their life – particularly middle managers with two children, maybe going to university – cannot turn down that sort of offer,” says Chadney.

;76% struggled to find senior managers

Measures which usually aid retention, such as good training and development schemes and promotion opportunities, cannot compete with pay rises of this magnitude.

Wilmott Dixon has started giving staff a “total rewards statement” with their annual salary review. This includes all the extras that the company pays on top of salary such as income protection, training and development, and cars. “This tells people what their worth to the company is,” says Chadney. “They realise that they are not earning £50,000, they’re earning £65,000.”

Brown pinpoints two reasons for the scarcity of more senior managers: the slump in entrants to construction degrees in the early 1990s and the strength of the global construction market. “We are clearly losing managers to international business. UK managers are increasingly working in other parts of the world.”

Brown offers two solutions: give young graduates more responsibility and bring in non-cognate graduates to train up for management positions, something the CIOB is encouraging through its specially-developed diploma.

“Companies should make more demands on young graduates. If you put a young graduate in at the deep end and watch them get on with it they will struggle for a while, but after that they will thrive,” says Brown.

These, however, are medium-term solutions. In the short-term, the only advice is to hang onto your senior managers, they’re worth a lot more than you might think.