Construction Management and Economics

Degree Apprenticeships (DA) have grown rapidly as a policy-driven response to skills shortages, particularly in Quantity Surveying (QS), where apprentices integrate occupational skills with academic learning through Work-Based Learning (WBL). However, completion rates remain lower than expected, pot…

Occupations in the skilled trades are highly segregated with women comprising 1–3% of this workforce in Western nations. We report on a systematic review of 26 articles, from 1998 to 2019, which explored women’s recruitment and retention in the skilled trades. Two research questions underpinned the …

The construction industry is responsible for 40% of European Union (EU) end-use emissions but addressing this is problematic, as evident from the performance gap between design intention and on-site energy performance. There is a lack of the expertise needed for low energy construction (LEC) in the …

Expertise in construction has typically been associated with the esoteric, where experts occupy privileged positions through their possession of specialist skills and knowledge. In this conceptual piece, an attempt is made to broaden this view of expertise found in the construction management litera…

Apprenticeships in England are undergoing major reform which will likely require employers to make a cash contribution to meeting the fees of their training providers. In return employers will be given more influence over the content of the training. If employers are expected to make a cash contribu…

The ongoing skills crisis in the UK construction industry has constrained the productive capacity of the industry. Past research and skills policies have largely failed to develop an understanding of the realities of the skills crisis at the grassroots level. Solutions offered by researchers and pol…

Two distinct divisions and concepts of labour are apparent from an analysis of social housebuilding sites in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands: the craft form, based on controlling the output of labour; and the industry form, based on the quality of labour input. These are associated with differen…

An overview is given of occupational safety and health and of training in the construction sector, summarizing the findings of different researchers. The studies discussed emphasize safety instruction and on the job training at sites, especially the teaching of first aid skills and accident preventi…

Construction skills and training needs have changed with the introduction of new business processes, different forms of organizing production and technical innovation. In the UK, training provision has failed to adapt fully to the needs of a modernizing industry. Formal training programmes have been…

The paper provides an overview of qualifications in the German construction workforce and draws comparisons with the situation in the British construction industry. The German system of general education and vocational training is outlined. Data from a variety of sources are used to describe both th…