The Lechley Community is open. Eleven career pathways, free.

The Lechley Community is live

Today the Lechley Community goes live at community.lechley.com. It is free, and it is open to anyone working in UK construction.

Here is what is behind the door. Eleven career pathways, one for each route through this industry: early careers, commercial, planning, estimating, operations, design management, M&E, bid management, digital and information management, health and safety, and mentoring. Each is four modules and sixteen lessons, each module ends in a ten question exam, and you need eight out of ten to move on. Finish all four and you get a certificate with your name on it. There is also a mentoring register, so people who have made the climb can be matched with people making it now.

The reason I built it is straightforward. This firm spends its working life looking at who gets promoted in UK construction and why, and most of that knowledge never leaves the search file. Writing it down as something a planner in Leeds or an estimator in Bristol can work through on a wet Tuesday evening seemed a better use of it. Nothing is gated behind a card. You sign in with an email address and a link, and that is the whole process.

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The week in construction

• Construction's downturn eased in July. The S&P Global PMI rose to 44.7 from 38.4 in June, its strongest reading since March, with commercial work the most resilient at 46.8 (Lechley News). Lechley take: activity is still contracting, but tender enquiries are reviving and confidence is up. Boards approve hires on confidence, not on output data; expect the hiring conversations to start well before the index crosses 50.
• United Infrastructure posted a record year. Revenues rose 17.8 per cent to £845.8m, EBITDA on continuing operations jumped 49 per cent to £102.2m, and the group order book now stands at £4.6bn (The Construction Index). Lechley take: the acquisitive infrastructure groups are quietly assembling serious delivery capability. For senior leaders, a growth business with a £24bn pipeline offers something the biggest names sometimes cannot: room to build.
• BAM's UK and Ireland business drove a strong half. Adjusted EBITDA rose 48 per cent to €98m on a standout civils performance, though the order book slipped from €6.9bn to €6.1bn, with major awards expected in the second half (Construction Enquirer). Lechley take: read the order book before the profit line. Part of that civils margin came from claim settlements on legacy jobs; order intake over the next two quarters will say more about hiring intent than the half year numbers do.

That first item ran on the community News feed on Thursday, four days before this email reached you. That is rather the point of it: the news lands there as it happens, and this stays the weekly read.

People on the move

Senior appointments logged by our moves tracker over the past fortnight:

• Philippa Kelly joins Lendlease as Director.
• John Ammentorp joins Arup as Head of Global Energy.
• Joe Goedereis joins Systech as Director of Client Success.

The full tracker updates weekly under Movers, with the tier one and tier two appointments called out.

What we have built for the next generation

The CITB's new Workforce Outlook puts a number on what everyone in the industry already feels: construction needs 206,000 additional workers by 2030, around 41,200 a year (Construction News). Most coverage frames that as a recruitment problem. It is also an explaining problem. This industry has never been good at telling people at the start of their working lives what it actually does, what the jobs are, or how anyone gets on in it.

So the pathway I spent the most time on is the one for people at the very beginning. The Early Careers Pathway runs from first role to first leadership. It opens by explaining who actually pays whom on a construction project and why risk travels in the opposite direction to the money, then walks through what each discipline really does on a Tuesday, the habits that quietly build a reputation in the first two years, when changing employer accelerates a career and when it simply resets it, how to read a job offer and what to do with a counter-offer, the different educations you get at a tier one, an SME and a consultancy, and what changes the first time you lead people older than you.

None of that is taught at university. Most of it is picked up by accident, about ten years late, from whoever happened to sit next to you. It is written down now, in one place, and it costs nothing. If you have graduates or apprentices coming through, or a son or daughter weighing up whether this industry is worth their time, send them the Early Careers Pathway. I would rather they had it than not.

Pass it on. If someone came to mind while you read that, send it to them now and it is done: WhatsApp  ·  LinkedIn  ·  Email. Or just forward this.

One useful thing

When you are judging whether it is a good time to move, ignore the headline PMI and read the sub-indices. July's headline was 44.7, but underneath it commercial work sat at 46.8, housing at 41.8 and civils at 38.3. Your market is your sub-sector, not the average of all three. Two minutes on the monthly release tells you whether your patch is turning before the press writes it up.

Go and have a look: community.lechley.com. Joining takes an email address and a click on the link that follows. No password, no card, nothing to cancel.

If you only do one thing, open the pathway that matches your job and read the first lesson. It takes about ten minutes and it will tell you quickly whether the rest is worth your time.