Trainee numbers survey 2004/2005

As part of the Sector Skills Council for Construction, CITB-ConstructionSkills has the task of producing a forecast of skills demand in the industry, and estimating the likely future supply of trained workers.

The starting point for these is an assessment of the levels of training within the industry. This is provided by CITB-ConstructionSkills’ annual Trainee Numbers Survey, which measures the number of people entering construction training. Data is collected from colleges, private training providers and construction industry training centres across Great Britain. These include those coming through CITB-ConstructionSkills own managing agency and those entering other formal certificated training at craft and technical level.

Over the years, the survey has evolved considerably and this year introduced a couple of significant amendments which have implications for comparing previous years data. Amendments to TNS 2004/2005.  The 2004/2005 survey was amended to as an outcome of work carried out by the Research Team with the Learning and Skills Council. This highlighted a significant difference between our figures for both apprentices and mechanical engineering and theirs – with our figures being much lower. Therefore the decision was taken to remove both from the 2004/2005 questionnaire and instead source the data from the national funding bodies across Great Britain.

Further investigation of why our “mechanical engineering” figures were so low concluded that as our questionnaires are sent to the Construction Departments within colleges they were unwittingly omitting mechanical engineering courses and as such these numbers were not being collected. The work to source the data for both mechanical engineering and apprentices is currently on-going.