In this publication, we highlight the significance and value of the built environment industry and how we must all come together to demonstrate the skills and opportunities a career in our sector holds for young people and career changers. We bring together data and evidence on the current and emerging trends that are driving the growth of the sector. We explore the myriad of roles and skills required to create the places of tomorrow and the many ladders of opportunity needed to equip young people with the essential skills to flourish in the industry.

 

A survey of industry professionals across 15 different disciplines spotlights key skills gaps, challenges, and ways forward for the sector, while a young people’s survey captures the perspectives of 13-18-year-olds, their awareness of the built environment, and their knowledge of career opportunities.

 

This seminal report highlights NLA's role to communicate, convene, and connect, highlighting the need to bring together industry, education providers, government, and NLA’s Future City Makers programme to forge a prosperous future for the sector.

London’s built environment sector — the city makers working in real estate, surveying, planning, architecture, engineering and construction, as well as their public sector counterparts — is collectively one of the largest employers in the capital, with a GVA contribution to London equivalent to the financial and professional services sector.

The ecosystem that supports it includes world-leading universities and professional standards bodies; liquid capital markets backed up by international financial services centres; and a 2,000-year-old built fabric that leads international players to choose London as their global base.

This makes it not only large in scale in London, but quite possibly the largest and most advanced cluster of built environment businesses anywhere in the world: designing, engineering and constructing the built world across continents. Its scale and influence is only set to grow, as the world continues to rapidly urbanise and decarbonise. 

The range of skills needed across these professions are extremely diverse and increasingly cross-cutting — meaning that there is a job for anyone in this industry, no matter your background, and huge opportunity to progress through a career in such a diverse ecosystem. 

Yet few outside the professions would understand the term ‘built environment’, little more know this is a sector so full of jobs and opportunities to forge a profitable and purposeful career that can have a real-life impact on the communities in which we live, as we demonstrate in the New London Agenda. 

This is largely caused by the siloed nature of the professional institutions that represent various parts of the industry. As a result, the lack of clear understanding within government of the scale and significance of the collective whole — both to the existing economy and its future potential — fails to put real political impetus behind supporting the skills, pathways to employment and policy levers that will support the sector to grow and flourish. 

This seminal piece of research by the NLA starts to uncover the interdisciplinary skills we need across these professions for the future, but perhaps more tellingly it uncovers the disjointed nature of how we currently seek to inspire future city makers into the industry and how narrow the pathways are that we provide into employment through our equally siloed education, apprenticeship and recruitment ecosystem.

As the only representative body for the built environment community across the public and private sectors, we think that this research points to a key role that the NLA can play in helping to change this reality and, as a result, we have identified three key areas of action to support those outside the industry into education and employment in this unique, rewarding and flourishing sector.

We are hugely optimistic about what we can achieve in this space and look forward to working with all of our members to make these ambitions a reality. 

As part of the ongoing conversations around this pivotal research, we'll be hosting various events to further discuss this pertinent topic within the industry. These events will engage voices from across the sector to further advocate for an accessible built environment.

This ongoing video series Skills for Places – My Story, shares an insight into the various roles the built environment sector offers. In these videos, you'll hear from people in various jobs from across the industry, and how they started their journeys into the built environment.

Do you have an interesting career path and job in the built environment you want to share? Get in touch with grace.simmonds@nla.london.