The construction industry training issues in the United States are considerable, but nothing when compared to the plans in India. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projections of need for the construction industry in the US from 2008 through 2018 suggest that there is a need to add 180,000 new workers a year or 1.8 million new workers by 2018. If we straight line that number through 2022 we get 2.16 million new workers.
According to a post yesterday on the Poten & Patners website, the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) of India has set a projection of training 150 million workers in 20 sectors by 2022. They are projecting a need for training 33 million new construction workers over that period of time. That equates to 6.5 times the number of construction workers needed in the US over the same period of time.
The very scale of that opportunity is amazing and the implications to construction world-wide are considerable. With the mobility of the construction workforce that we are already seeing today in developing economies and the potential need to replicate the total amount of built space in the US by 2030, our need to resolve the undocumented worker problem in our country takes on a new dimension.
The article quotes Dilip Chenoy, chief executive officer and managing director of NSDC, as saying that the construction workforce is “the most difficult to train. One of the challenges is that training material like cement cannot be reused.”
Today India produces about 4 million skilled workers in the 20 sectors and they will need to ramp that overall number up to 40 million per year or 45,000 people per day in order to meet the goals set by the Indian government. The challenges represented by these numbers are monumental, especially if the NSDC ever expects to meet the building standards set in the US or in Europe.
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