Stewart Baseley, Executive Chairman of the Home Builders Federation, writes for Go Construct on how you could help deliver the communities of the future by starting a career in house building.
We are facing an acute housing shortage in this country, with all experts agreeing we need to dramatically increase the number of homes being built. Over the past few years housing has become a key priority for politicians and successive Governments have introduced policies that are allowing the house building industry to increase its output.
To build these desperately needed homes the industry needs to recruit and train a new generation of house builders and is looking for the very best and brightest young people.
Developers today use state of the art design techniques, standards and materials to deliver homes that are of the very highest quality within truly sustainable communities. The process of actually creating a new community is a very complex one. From negotiating a deal to buy the land and navigating the planning system to designing a new development and purchasing the materials that allow an empty field or disused old factory site to be transformed into a new community – requires a huge range of skills and talents.
So the industry has a wide range of career paths - professional and trade, site and office based - to offer young people looking for a rewarding and challenging career.
As well as the traditional roles that people expect house building to involve – bricklaying, scaffolding, earth workers and roofers – there are a whole host of other roles we need to fill if we are to build tomorrow’s homes.
We need accountants, environmental engineers, land buyers, drainage designers, architects, material orderers, surveyors, sales staff, site foremen, safety officers, building inspectors – the list goes on. But what is certain, we need the very best young people to fill all these roles if we are to build the very best communities.
Solving our housing crisis will require a wide range of people to each play a key part; politicians need to introduce policies that enable developers to build; local communities and local councils need to engage in the local development and planning process so that the right type and number of homes are allocated in the right places; and then the people working within the house building industry, that’ll be designing and building the towns and cities of the future, can get on with their job and deliver high quality developments.
Communities only work if they are made to fit in with the world around them. House building planners and engineers work with their counterparts in the wider construction industry to make sure that these great new places are connected with the world around them.
A career in construction is truly like no other. How many people can claim to have been involved in projects that will stand the test of time for maybe generations; that will be seen and used by millions, that people will live in, travel on or rely on for their everyday essentials? People working on a construction project go home every day having seen another little step taken on their project, a further bit of progress made. And as the weeks and months pass, what they have studied and poured over on drawings, pictures and plans, gradually emerges from the ground and becomes reality. Working in construction is truly unique.
Be a part of something amazing and take your first step towards helping build the communities of tomorrow today. Visit Go Construct and House Building Careers, to find out about the wide range of opportunities available within housebuilding and the wider construction industry.
There is a construction career to excite everyone, no matter where your talents, skills or interest lie.
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