Employer strategies to develop skills in projectified work of mega infrastructure renewal

In the last six month employer representing organisations are starting to react to an impending skills crisis. As major reparations and maintenance work for infrastructure and power supply have been neglected in the past 50 years, increased workloads have placed both public and private sectors, clients, consultants and contractors, in a position of reduced capacity to deliver a timely response, to the required quality of product or service. The traditional leavers that allowed a swift response are routed in the development of new institutionalised practice to recruit (in the past semi-skilled) staff with the “specific exchange value”. Most interesting examples have included the recruitment from groups that have previously not been considered in traditional recruitment and either delivers value due to their general exchange or the more specific exchange. The current agenda focus on “acquiring people capability cost-effectively” in the background of the upcoming referendum on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Not surprisingly, the price plea is made in recognition of “global talent market”, “innovate industrial approaches to optimise the use of people” and “funding commitment to National Infrastructure Plan”. The primary research sheds light on the labour process, supply of skills implications, the Build, Borrow, Buy Model and implications for the skills and underlying knowledge. Here traditional consultation, negotiation and protected “skills” model has been replaced against new leavers that favour new models of employment. This phenomena observed can be mirrored with the projectification of society by (Sloterdijk, 2014) when traditions and democracy as the "inhibitors" meet capitalism as "accelerators".