The Generation Standing Outside the Gate

Alan Milburn called them an anxious generation this week. Not a soft one. Not snowflakes. Anxious. And the difference between those two words is the whole argument.

The government's jobs tsar, a former health secretary, has warned that Britain faces an economic catastrophe driven by youth unemployment. His interim report lands on a number that should stop every employer in this country where they stand. Close to a million people aged 16 to 24 are not in education, not in employment, and not in training. Almost a million.

What I keep coming back to is the detail underneath that number, because the detail is where the truth usually hides. More than half of those young people have never held a job at all. Not a bad job, not the wrong job. No job. And among those signed off, the share pointing to mental health as the thing holding them back has climbed to 43 per cent, up from 24 per cent in 2011, while the share blaming physical health has fallen away. So the shape of the problem has changed underneath us, and a lot of us have not noticed. We are not looking at a generation that cannot do the work. We are looking at a generation that has never once been shown the way in.

I want to talk about what that means for construction. Because I think our industry has a particular part to play here, and I think we also have a particular blind spot, and the two are sitting right next to each other.

We have spent years complaining about the wrong thing

Ask anyone in the built environment what their biggest constraint is and the answer comes back before you have finished the question. People. We cannot find the people. The workforce is ageing, the pipeline is thin, and every major programme, from the new hospitals to Sizewell C, is fishing in the same small pond for the same experienced heads.

All of that is true. But hold it up next to Milburn's number and something does not add up. We say there is nobody to hire. There are almost a million young people standing outside the gate. So the problem is not a shortage of human beings. It is a shortage of ways in. We have been complaining about an empty room while a queue forms at a door we never built.

And here is the uncomfortable bit, because it points back at the work I do. For years the conversation in construction recruitment has been about poaching. Who can lure the commercial director off a rival. Who can tempt the project lead away from a competing scheme. That is the market I work in, and I am not going to stand here and pretend it is going away, because it pays the bills and senior search matters. But a sector that only ever moves the same experienced people around between the same firms is not solving its workforce problem. It is passing it back and forth across the table and calling that a strategy.

Anxious does not mean incapable

When you read about a generation struggling with anxiety, the instinct is to assume they are not built for it. Not built for a site. Not built for the pressure of a live programme. I think that instinct is wrong, and I think it is going to cost the firms that follow it.

Look at what Milburn actually said. These young people are not faking it. They are not work-shy. They are anxious, and a lot of the time they are anxious for the simplest reason there is. They have had so little contact with the world of work that the thought of walking into it feels enormous. That is not a flaw in their character. It is a gap in their experience. And experience is the one thing, the single thing, that an employer is actually able to hand someone.

Think about what a first job really gives a person. A young person who has never worked has also never had the chance to find out they are good at something. The first site induction. The first time someone trusts them with a real task and walks away. The first time a foreman or a commercial lead says well done and means it. We file those under soft. They are not soft. For someone who has spent their formative years anxious and indoors, those are the moments that do the rewiring. That is the cure sitting inside the thing we keep saying we cannot afford.

What the firms who win will actually do

The report says employers will increasingly need to provide a high level of pastoral care for young people living with mental distress. I can already see a few site directors wincing at that sentence. They should not.

Because pastoral care is not coddling. On a site it is not soft at all. It is a named person who checks in. It is someone explaining what good looks like instead of assuming everyone walked in already knowing. It is a manager who understands that the quiet, nervous nineteen year old in week one might be a sharp, capable site engineer by year three, if somebody holds their nerve through the wobble in between. That is not charity. That is management. We just stopped calling it that.

So let me put it plainly, because this is the part I believe without hesitation. The firms that treat early careers as a genuine pipeline, and not a box to tick for a framework bid, are the ones who pull ahead. Not because it is kind, although it is. Because in a market this tight, the business that learns to grow its own people holds something no competitor can poach off it.

Why I care about this

My own start was on site as a quantity surveyor with a tier-one contractor. I know what it is to be the youngest in the room, unsure whether you belong, learning the job by watching people who had been doing it longer than you had been alive. Somebody gave me that chance. And the industry that gave it to me is now staring at a whole generation it is at risk of writing off before they have started.

So this summer I am doing something about it rather than just writing about it.

On Monday 6th July I am launching the first cohort of the Lechley Early Career Programme. Six weeks. Thirty places. Free for this first cohort. It is for anyone in the first five years of a career in UK construction, or anyone about to step into one. Students. Graduates. Early-career quantity surveyors, site engineers, project managers. The people who have been told to keep their heads down for three years and trust that the career will sort itself out.

It will not. Not on its own. Not without the right conversations happening at the right time.

So those are the conversations the six weeks are built around. Each week there is a long-form piece from me on the things careers services never tell you. The real difference between site and commercial. Money, spoken about honestly. How your first promotion actually happens, as opposed to how you think it does. The firms worth your name, and the warning signs to read before you ever sign. Then there are two live sessions with senior figures from across the industry, where members type the questions and the guest types back. No video. No prep. No PR script sitting between you and a straight answer. There are office hours every Friday for whatever the week has thrown up. And running underneath all of it, a group of other people working through the same decisions at the same moment, so that nobody is doing it alone in the dark.

I am holding it at thirty on purpose. A community only works at the size where people genuinely come to know each other. Once those thirty are taken, that is the cohort closed.

So if you are early in your career, or you are reading this and a name has already come to mind, the way in is on the Lechley website in the community section. Apply here: https://lechley.mn.co/plans/1981345?bundle_token=491a93e7fb3af59e202b69cf02960b0a&utm_source=manual

This is the part of Milburn's report I keep turning over. He framed the answer as a movement, a coalition of the concerned. In construction we have spent a long time treating the skills crisis as weather, as something that happens to us. It is not weather. It is a choice we keep deferring.

The talent is there. Almost a million strong. Anxious, untested, waiting. The only real question left is whether our industry is willing to do the slow, unglamorous, deeply worthwhile work of bringing it through the gate.

I think the firms that answer yes are the ones still standing in twenty years. I would rather we were one of them. I suspect, if you have read this far, so would you.