Schools and colleges have broken up and, aside from the unpredictable weather, this means lots of young people will now be nervously waiting for their exam results and preparing for the next stage of their life.

While some will know exactly what they want to do, others might still be considering the options. For anyone considering a career in construction but not knowing where to start, we’ve got three steps you could follow in this week’s blog.

Following repeated calls from leaders within the construction industry, the Home Office has finally announced it is easing visa restrictions for brickies, roofers and chippies from overseas by adding them to the UK’s Shortage Occupation List (SOL).

This list is designed to help sectors where employers are struggling to fill vacancies and the move to include more construction trades has been welcomed by the Construction Leadership Council as a solution to addressing immediate skills shortages in the UK. Find out more in this week’s quick-read blog.

For most tradespeople, their van is not only a means of getting to and from work but also a vital part of their livelihood, holding many of the tools and materials they need to fulfil the day’s work.

How you fit out and organise your van can make a big difference in terms of the lifespan of your tools and equipment and also how efficient you are able to be on the job. With theft from vans being quite common, security is another major concern.

This week, we’re sharing five tips which could help you make sure your van is practical for your needs, well-organised and secure – in other words, fit for work.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been sharing what we know about some of the careers people can choose in construction. So far, we’ve looked at what it means to take up physical, on-site jobs like bricklaying and roofing but, while these are common and important roles, the sector offers a much broader range of possibilities than this.

In fact, construction is one of the biggest industries in the world and so there are literally hundreds of career pathways to choose from. For instance, there are Architects, CAD technicians, Quantity Surveyors, Site Engineers, Contracts Managers, Estimators, Construction Managers, BIM Coordinators, Commercial Managers, Health and Safety professionals, Environmental Consultants and a whole host of other back-office roles like accountancy, office management and digital marketing.

In this third and final part of our Careers in Construction series, we’re going to give a brief overview of five of these roles.

From April 2022, a new app is set to make the process of checking CSCS skills cards at construction sites a lot simpler, improving site safety and tackling fraud in the process.

At the moment, different trades are signed up to 38 different card schemes which display the CSCS logo. This can lead to all kinds of complications when checking documentation and potentially to workers taking on roles they’re not suitably qualified/ trained for.

The CSCS Smart Check app is being developed as a solution that will allow all 2.1 million cards in the construction industry to be electronically verified quickly and easily in a single place. Keep reading…

Last week we laid on a thank you BBQ as we bid farewell to most of the tradespeople who have been working at our Kingham Way site in Luton which is nearing completion. While Sheriff’s internal teams took on the management, brickwork and roofing works at this site, Kingham Way has only come this far with the support of all kinds of specialist tradespeople – carpenters, plumbers, plasterers/ dry liners, electricians, painters and decorators, tilers and more. Read this week’s blog for more about the project and who was involved.

All CSCS cards should have a smart chip embedded into them by March 2022. That’s the recommendation being made by the Construction Leadership Council which it says will improve security and efficiency, thereby protecting the integrity of the system. CSCS cards are widely recognised as the industry-standard requirement for all on-site construction operatives.