VIY supports first Construction Skills Shortage Week

Here’s how we’re already acting on a number of recommendations made within the On The Tools Skills Shortage White Paper – and how you could get involved and do #SomethingConstructive together with us to help reduce the shortage.

Working with young people and their current educators

• Taking from zero to ‘the first rung on the ladder’ through practical, accessible and inclusive hands-on skills training experiences, the chance to gain Entry Level City & Guilds accreditations and boost their apprenticeship/work-readiness – in a way that’s not happening in schools and colleges

• Inspiring young people to consider construction as a relevant and rewarding career pathway – specifically more diverse audiences that are currently underrepresented in the sector including women, young people who are neurodiverse, have a disability or from ethnic minority backgrounds

• By seeing first-hand the positive impact of the VIY experience on site, educators, youth workers, support workers, parents and other adult influences are gaining an insight into the industry to reinforce it as a positive pathway for the young learners they support

Get young people involved here

Working with tradespeople 

• Mobilising tradespeople and construction workers as positive role models and inspirational for young people on our projects by sharing their skills and own lived experience of a career in the trade

• Improving their own sense of wellbeing by mentoring young people and making an impact in their community on projects of real social value

Volunteer or become a Mentor here

Working with employers

• Working in partnership with a wide range of cross-sector partners, including many big players from the trade and construction, like Dulux, Toolstation and Travis Perkins, and housebuilders like Keepmoat Homes and Persimmon Homes to make our projects happen through materials donations, volunteer mentors, project funding and progression pathways for young people within their company or with their customers

• Directly connecting construction employers and professional tradespeople on VIY projects with brilliant young people who have demonstrated appetite and aptitude (through VIY) and are looking for a next step opportunity into the industry, just like Ali, now an apprentice with contractor Ian Williams, through our partnership with Dulux

• Increasingly, we’re looking to bring employers/construction firms, tradespeople and young people together to share both valuable new retrofit and green skills, as well maintaining more traditional heritage skills including carpentry, by working on community facility retrofit projects and heritage buildings

Talk to us about working in partnership