David Reid, co-founder of Powering Futures, will take to the stage at this year’s Scottish Construction Summit with a clear message for the industry: the real talent crisis isn’t a lack of young people wanting to work; it’s a lack of understanding on both sides about where they’d fit.

Powering Futures was established around the time of COP26, six years ago, with a narrower remit than it has today. “Our premise was originally about how do we unleash talent in the apprentice, technician and graduate community in businesses to solve sustainability and climate change challenges,” Reid explains. Young people, he reasoned, had “open minds” and a “lack of baggage” - qualities that made them well placed to tackle problems industry veterans were struggling with.

That early programme was three months long and built around teams solving real sustainability challenges set by their own employers. It produced an unexpected result. “What came out of it was, whilst they came up with some great solutions, the biggest piece was businesses saying, geez, we’ve got some great talent in our business I didn’t even know existed.”

A request from local schools to bring the programme into classrooms changed its direction entirely. What started as a transition-to-work initiative became, in Reid’s words, a response to COVID’s lasting damage to young people’s confidence, teamwork and communication.

“Businesses didn’t talk about technical training or technical qualifications. They spoke about: ‘could you just give us young people who can communicate, can work in teams, turn up, be reliable and have that confidence’.” That schools programme has since grown into a 30-week qualification, with around 2,000 young people going through it last year alone.

Reid is blunt about what motivates the businesses Powering Futures works with today. “The last thing we’re looking for is goodwill,” he says, describing that as “yesterday’s discussion”.

What businesses actually want to talk about now is talent. Finding it, keeping it, and reducing the risk of investing in someone who doesn’t work out. Powering Futures positions itself as the layer that de-risks that investment, working with young people on their interests and strengths before matching them to roles, rather than leaving employers to gamble on four or five months of training with no guarantee of return.

That focus, Reid argues, is where the industry’s real opportunity lies, particularly for what he calls the “middle 60” of the school population - pupils who are neither high academic achievers nor disengaged from education entirely, but who make up the bulk of the future workforce in sectors like construction and energy. “That’s the people who turn up in construction… and yet they don’t have the opportunity to do many things.”

A seat at the Summit, and an eye on the mid-tier

Reid sees construction as a textbook example of the disconnect Powering Futures was built to address. Young people, he says, often can’t name more than a handful of careers - “doctor, fireman, nurse, teacher” - and have little real sense of what construction jobs actually involve beyond outdated images of building sites in winter.

His session at the Summit will dig into that gap, and into how understanding a young person’s talents before pointing them at a career can work for an industry that, by its own admission, struggles to get young people engaged despite chronic demand for workers.

But it’s the industry’s middle tier that Reid is most keen to reach. Large contractors, he notes, rarely struggle for applicants. “The big corporates tend to say, well, we get thousands of applications for every job, so we are fine.” The problem is what’s left over once those firms have had first pick.

“If you go down through the supply chain, eventually you get to the ones that say we can’t get good people, because the biggies are catching them first.”

Big businesses can absorb a few bad hires; smaller ones in the supply chain often can’t. “I’d love to spend much more time with that mid-tier, who I believe have probably got more of an issue in terms of attracting talent. If we don’t get that mid-tier working, then your projects don’t happen.”

Future Talent Hub

The Summit’s new Future Talent Hub, delivered in partnership with Developing the Young Workforce, gives Reid a direct route to both audiences at once. For Powering Futures, it’s effectively a shop window: a chance to put the organisation in front of the school pupils, students and early-career talent who’ll be attending on the day, while making its case to the employers it wants to recruit into its programmes.

Reid’s pitch to young people attending is straightforward. “You could either just keep applying for jobs slightly with your fingers crossed, or you could step out, do something different and show employers what you can do.”

His pitch to businesses is just as direct. Get the right young person into the right role, with the right attitude, and the returns look after themselves. “The more that we get the right people in the right slots, we also get a real uptick in productivity.”