Which projects will be hiring in eighteen months?

Three weeks ago the Lechley app was a page of notes. On Thursday evening Apple's review came back, and it is live now on iPhone, free, at lechley.com/get. The Android version is still with Google and should follow next week; the same link will work when it does. It is the top of this issue. The rest of the week, which was not a quiet one, follows.

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This week's question is about the app, and what it should do next. The Pipeline tab carries 616 government projects: the client, the stage each has reached, the spend by year and where roles are open on them. That is one answer to a bigger question. What would you most want to know eighteen months before everyone else?

Which projects are about to start hiringWhich clients and contractors are winning the workWhat my role pays in another region or sectorWho has moved, and which seat it opened

Vote with one tap, and read my take on Friday: community.lechley.com/question.

From my desk

Last week I asked how many people the industry needs to recruit over the next five years. Thirteen of you voted, across the email, the app and the page, and eight said nobody knows. You are right about the industry and wrong about the number. The CITB's 206,000 is growth after leavers are netted off. The Trade Skills Index's 937,000 is everyone who has to walk through the door over ten years, which is around half a million over five, so the one of you who said half a million was closest. The reconciliation is on the question page, and the Lancaster economists have the winter to test it: community.lechley.com/question/weekly-2026-11-02.

Now the app. Most of this industry does not sit at a desk. It is in a site cabin at seven, in a van between two jobs, or on a train with twenty minutes to kill, and that is when people think about their careers. For as long as I have done this job I have watched good people decide their next move on whatever reached them in those twenty minutes: a rumour from a subcontractor, a recruiter's cold call, a LinkedIn post that was really an advert. So this week we put something else in those twenty minutes.

Five tabs, each doing one job. This week: the news, movers, insights and the Friday roundup, with comments, saving and sharing. Roles: the searches I have live, with enough detail to decide before a first conversation, and apply from the phone. Learn: all twelve pathways, from Early Careers to Mentoring, with the lessons, the exams and a certificate in your own name that goes onto LinkedIn in one tap. You: your profile, your alerts and Get matched, for a mentor or the Exchange. And Pipeline, which is the point.

Every January someone tells you the work is coming. Nobody tells you where, when, or who will be hired to deliver it. The government does publish it. NISTA's infrastructure pipeline lists the projects, the clients, the stage each has reached, the spend by year and the route to approval, and it models the workforce each sector will need. It is a remarkable piece of work, and a spreadsheet almost nobody in the industry has opened. It is in the app now, 616 projects of it. Open one and you see what it is, where it is, who the client is, how much is being spent and when, and where we know of roles on it, ours or an employer's, they sit on the same screen. Follow a project, a client, a sector or a region and the app tells you when a role opens on it or its stage changes, by notification or by one email on a Monday. The salary guide is there too, 32 roles with base ranges and day rates, and every figure moves with the region you pick.

Setting up takes about a minute. Download at lechley.com/get (iPhone now, Android next week), sign in with your email and the code we send, use the same address if you are already a member so your progress comes with you, fill in your role, discipline and region, and follow two or three projects you care about. Employers recruiting directly for a role on one of these projects can list it on that project at community.lechley.com/hire: free while it launches, checked by hand, employers only. There is no advertising in it. The question I want answered is at the bottom of this email.

On the desk, Monday opened with a civils lead for the data centre delivery partner's European work. Tuesday put the client and the candidate on the same call for the Head of Health appointment in Canada, which has come down to the package, as most of them do. The Operations Director search for the Irish contractor's UK business took a new name onto the list ahead of client interviews next week. On Thursday a partner at a cost consultancy in Norwich rang me, unprompted, because Sizewell C has its money and he wants to know who is recruiting and how. On Friday I was back at Lancaster, this time with the business management students, who have taken on a project about the community itself. More on that when there is something to show.

The market observation is the Norwich call set beside the Vistry item below. People are now choosing where to live by a programme with an in-service date in the 2030s, and leaving housebuilder regions that may not exist in January. That is the geography the Pipeline tab was built to show.

The week in construction

• Vistry has started cutting jobs as it folds 25 regions into 12 from January, with the new regional managing directors confirmed, £50m of savings targeted for 2027 and no number yet on how many roles go. Average daily net debt is expected to reach about £800m in the second half, the £900m loan facilities are being refinanced, and the forward order book is £3.1bn, down £200m since the half year. Thirteen regional leadership teams disappear in January, so land, commercial and technical heads in the merged regions are having their futures decided now, not in the new year. If that is you, the civils and energy employers further down are filling their teams this winter, and as a former QS I would say your commercial skills transfer better than you fear. The gap is sector language, not ability. Source: Construction Enquirer, 5 Nov
• October's PMI fell to 43.6, the 22nd month below 50, and housing did the damage at 35.1, its lowest reading this year, while civil engineering at 45.9 recorded its slowest decline since May 2025 and commercial held at 46.3. Glenigan has residential starts down 29% on last year and civils starts up 19%. The supply chain said the same thing in its own numbers: Ibstock's clay and brick volumes ran 22% below its own forecast in the third quarter and it cut profit guidance, and Barratt Redrow's completions fell 12% to 3,223 over 17 weeks, with full-year guidance held at 17,500 to 17,900. Bricklayers only order when a site is building out, so the brick number is the honest one. The gap between 35.1 and 45.9 is where the hiring is, and a QS or planner in a residential business should be looking at who is winning the civils starts. Sources: Construction News, 5 Nov; Building, 2 Nov; Lechley Community, 4 Nov
• Administrations rose by a third in October to 24 firms, 60% more than a year earlier, and the names were specialists: Woodford Heating and Energy in Essex, an M&E firm with 138 staff; Torsion Projects in Leeds, where 54 were made redundant; and Gardner and Co, a Gillingham ductwork firm with 49. RSM expects more through the fourth quarter and the first half of 2027. This is mid-sized specialists on thin margins failing within weeks of each other, not a headline main contractor, and anyone on a fixed-price package should be asking the main contractor how the job is really running before Christmas. If you are a building services engineer in Essex or Kent, the water M&E frameworks are the nearest open door. Anglian named 20 firms to a £301m one running to 2035 last week. Sources: Construction News, 4 Nov; Lechley Community, 31 Oct
• Morgan Sindall raised its forecast and launched a £75m share buyback. It expects 2026 slightly ahead of expectations, with Construction heading for double-digit profit growth on revenue approaching £1.5bn and Infrastructure the same on revenue approaching £1bn, both at the top of their margin ranges, and it took places on all five lots of Pagabo's £5bn Major Works Framework in October. Partnership housing profit expectations came down on affordability. Two divisions growing at margins near 4%, with a £5bn framework to staff, need project leads, commercial managers and bid teams. The partnership housing arm is the one place to expect caution. Source: Construction News, 5 Nov
• Mace Construct becomes Forco in January. The name came out on Wednesday, with around 60 sites rebranded between 11 and 29 January, a staff launch on 21 January, a new head office near Liverpool Street and a target of £3bn revenue by 2030, from £2.3bn last year and a lower figure expected this year. Mark Reynolds takes the chief executive job himself alongside the chair, and the Mace name stays with Mace Consult. A £3bn target means Forco has to hire, but the harder test is retention. Every senior person there spends January deciding whether a new name on the hard hat is a reason to stay or a prompt to look. If you are one of them, hit reply. Sources: Construction News, 4 Nov; Lechley Community, 5 Nov
• Babcock moved KierBAM into £600m of main works at Devonport, and National Grid picked Balfour Beatty for Britain's biggest substation. At Devonport, 10 Dock is strengthened and refloored for Astute-class submarine maintenance, with a heavy-lift gantry crane and new workshops, and the joint venture launched a drive this summer to recruit 120 people for the phase. On Teesside, the Node A substation at Teesworks, thought to be worth over £200m, adds 1.44GW for data centres and advanced manufacturing, with first capacity due by the end of 2029 after six months of remediation. Marine civils in Plymouth and high-voltage civils in the North East, both running to 2029, both for clients that do not stop spending when the housing market does. Sources: Construction Enquirer and Construction Enquirer, 2 Nov

People on the move

• James Garnett, group operations director at GMI Construction, a newly created role, after seven years at Morgan Sindall, latest as operations director for the North East and Cumbria. GMI turned over £233m last year, flat, with operating profit up from about £678k to £1.8m. A regional creating a group operations seat is a regional that wants tighter control across its regions and a bigger run at public sector work. Construction Enquirer, 4 Nov
• Howard Smith, chief operations officer at HS2, after running operations on Crossrail and the Elizabeth line. The job is the handover from building a railway to running one, alongside Network Rail and West Coast Partnership Development. More
• Shaun Hughes, finance chief at Mace Consult, the advisory business that kept the Mace name after the March split. Construction News, 3 Nov

All 37 of this week's senior moves are in Movers, 5 November.

Other areas of interest

The pipeline nobody opened. Twice a year the government publishes the only document that answers the question every career decision in this industry depends on: which projects will need people, where, and when. The NISTA infrastructure pipeline carries each scheme's client, stage, funding status, spend by year and in-service date, and beside it a workforce model by occupation and region. The trade press runs the headline total and moves on. Hiring managers plan off the advert they posted last month. Candidates plan off the advert they saw last week. Meanwhile the document that says a water treatment programme in the East of England will need planners and commercial managers from 2028 sits on a government website in a format nobody reads on a phone.

That is why the Pipeline tab exists, and why it does one more thing: when a role appears on a project you follow, ours or an employer's own, you hear about it before the advert goes round. The question you can ask changes. Not who is hiring, but which projects will be hiring in eighteen months and what will they need. That is the question that gets you into the right seat before the job is posted.

Coming in January: a pay and sentiment survey for directors only, anonymous, with the results free to read. Tell me when it opens.

New on the community

Published this week:

• The pipeline, the roles and your pathway, in one app (Thoughts)
• Housing cuts regions while infrastructure keeps hiring (This week)
• Construction and the Milburn report: what employers need to know (Insights)
• Movers, 5 November 2026: 37 senior appointments
• Graham wins first tower at £1.2bn Liverpool scheme (News)
• MAG picks 20 firms for £600m airports framework (News)

All of it free at community.lechley.com, and in the This week tab of the app.

One useful thing

Before you accept an offer on a major project, look the project up. In the app's Pipeline tab, or in NISTA's own spreadsheet, check three things: the scheme status (business case, procurement or construction), the funding status, and the in-service date. A role on a project still at business case is a role the next spending review can remove. A role on a project in construction with an in-service date in 2031 is five years of work whatever the PMI says. Ask the hiring manager which it is. If they do not know, that tells you something too.

What I'm working on

The Operations Director search for an established Irish contractor's UK business, based in the Thames Valley, goes to client interviews next week with a new name on the list, and the London Major Projects Director search stays live. The Head of Health appointment in Canada is at offer. Europe's dedicated data centre delivery partner has senior roles open across Dublin, Milan and Portugal, from Project Leads to EHS and digital transformation. Every brief is at lechley.com/jobs and in the Roles tab of the app.