The skills gap looks different from where we sit

At the tail end of 2025, I worked with BE News on their Skills Gap Spotlight + Hackathon event, during which industry figures were united in their thoughts on the built environment industry’s skills shortage, noting that this is a retention problem as much as a numbers once.

From where I sit in the world of placing people into the built environment industry, this rings true, but it runs deeper than just retention. Let’s start at the front door. The built environment contributes a huge amount to UK GDP, yet most children and teenagers could not tell you what any of these careers actually involve.

NLA’s 2025 research found that just 7% of young people surveyed even recognise the term “built environment”. Planning, project controls, cost management and surveying have nothing like the pull of the professions with a TV drama behind them. You can’t choose a career you’ve never heard of and this challenge is just exacerbated by the fact that when the industry does make the news, the headlines are all too often focused on construction shortages. There is no behind the curtain look at the wider built environment and the opportunities the industry can offer.

Even when people do enter the industry, we lose them again almost immediately whenever the market tightens. The financial crash of 2008/9 marked one such wave of departures. Throw into the mix COVID, a struggling economy and the wider geopolitical instability and it’s not hard to see why clients struggle to justify hires or retention.

When progression stalls, people don’t announce it. The candidates Cobalt speak to are quietly asking the same question from different angles. For someone a couple of years into a planning or surveying career, it’s whether the skills they’re building now will still matter once their organisation properly adopts AI. For someone weighing a move, it’s watching what a similar role pays elsewhere and recalculating whether they’re still valued where they are. Different stages, same underlying question: where do I stand? We tend to see that moment in real time, because it’s the moment they call us.

AI is starting to sharpen it. We see this ourselves, and participants at the Cobalt/BE News ‘Map the Gap’ industry roundtable debate at UKREiiF said the same, noting the candidates who had been put through eight stages of an automated hiring process without once speaking to a human. If you want to know where the built environment industry loses its people, that’s a good place to look.

None of this is beyond fixing. Where the sector invests properly, the response is immediate. Companies and organisations represented at the roundtable debate reported that degree apprentices consistently show stronger commercial awareness than those coming through traditional graduate routes. One participant described moving entirely to an apprenticeship model and being inundated with applications. Mentorship changes outcomes wherever it’s genuinely resourced. The problem isn’t that these things don’t work. It’s that they’re offered inconsistently, and no one has yet measured the gap well enough to direct the effort.

If we really want to invite people into the built environment industry, there are many places that we need to make meaningful change, but right now those entry level hires are vital and ensuring they have a positive of the industry is imperative.

That’s why Cobalt, in collaboration with BE News, is launching “Map the Gap” campaign. Two short surveys, one for employers and one for employees, will establish where the gaps are, why they persist and what will genuinely close to them. The findings feed into an industry event later this year, and into evidence the sector can take to government with one voice rather than a dozen competing ones.

If you employ people in this industry, or work in it yourself, a few minutes of your time will make those findings sharper. I see both sides of this market every day, and this research is meant to help the whole sector, not just the people we place.

Take the employer or employee survey here

If you’re an employer, tell us about your recruitment challenges, where your skills shortfalls really are, how retention is trending and what’s shaping your pay and hiring decisions. Complete the Built Environment Job Prospects Employer Survey here.

If you’re an employee, tell us how secure you’re feeling in your role, whether AI is changing what your job actually looks like, whether you’re weighing up a move and why, and what your ideal package would look like. Your answers shape what the industry does next for people at your stage, not just the stage above you. Complete the Built Environment Job Prospects Employee Survey here.