Women Are The Key To Filling Skills Gaps
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Only 1 per cent of the construction workforce is female, yet the industry is facing a massive skills shortage. According to the Construction Industry Training Board, the sector needs to recruit and retain more than 74,000 new people every year for the next five years.
The IT industry fares a little better, with a 20 per cent female workforce. But Terry Watts, chief operating officer at the Government's Sector Skills Council for the industry, E-skills UK, said that numbers were steadily dropping.
"It has been declining by roughly 1 per cent every year for the past 15 years," he said.
The EOC research shows that the Modern Apprenticeship scheme needs to be overhauled, as it is entrenching traditional recruitment patterns and is not attracting more women into male-dominated sectors. In engineering, for example, only 6 per cent of people taking a Foundation Modern Apprenticeship are female. Women make up 8 per cent of the existing workforce.
Slowcock admitted that there have been a variety of initiatives to increase the number of women entering these industries, but that the message was not reaching the right people or at the right time
