LAYING FOUNDATIONS FOR THE FUTURE
Addressing skills gaps is vital to avoid stagnation
As surveyors, we are experts at understanding the lay of the land and how the land moves and changes over time. However, I think we would all agree that sometimes we need to spend more time thinking about how the land lies in our own sector. Are we, as surveyors, aware of the changes and challenges to come? Are we ready, prepared and resilient enough to meet them?
One of the challenges that concerns me is the skills gap that we face in our sector. In common with other sectors, older workers are retiring at a faster rate than new workers are being recruited. Holdens, the chartered surveyors and building consultancy, published a white paper last year entitled The Surveying Crisis1, highlighting that more than 25% of current surveyors are expected to retire within the next decade, leaving a substantial skills gap. Meanwhile, the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) published a detailed analysis of the skills requirements in the UK construction sector last year and found that we need an additional 1,380 surveyors need to be recruited every year up until 2028 to meet demand.
The effects of the skills shortage could be far-reaching and lead to increased workloads, increase the number of project delays and, perhaps most worryingly, increase risks to the quality of our sector’s work.
If this gap persists over the course of a decade, we would be short more than 13,800 surveyors. CITB’s forecast for the civil engineering sector was even worse, with an annual recruitment requirement of 1,600 more workers a year.
Again, if we extrapolate these figures over 10 years, we need 16,000 more civil engineering workers. As Holdens points out, the effects of the skills shortage could be far-reaching and lead to increased workloads, increase the number of project delays and, perhaps most worryingly, increase risks to the quality of our sector’s work.
At the same time, Britain is also afflicted by a wider digital and data skills gap. A House of Commons briefing paper from last year highlighted that the government believes the digital skills gap across all sectors is estimated to cost the UK economy £63bn per year.
And a UK government report, entitled Quantifying the UK Data Skills Gap2, found that almost half of businesses (46%) have struggled to recruit for roles requiring hard data skills.
Additionally, the supply of graduates with specialist data skills from universities is limited, and half of all workers surveyed had not received any data skills training in the previous two years.
These two combined skills challenges should not be viewed in isolation. In a world where children have been born and grown up surrounded by digital technology, embracing digital working methods gives the surveying sector an opportunity to attract a new generation of digital natives.
I’m pleased to say that CICES has been, and indeed still is, at the forefront of efforts to tackle these challenges and address both the skills gap in surveying and in digital.
As CICES said in its 2022 white paper Transforming the Civil Engineering Surveyor: “When looking at skills in civil engineering surveying, one has to consider both the shortage of digital skills in the current surveyor and the shortage of skilled new surveyors. As a professional qualifying body, CICES has a role to play in addressing both issues.” It certainly does, as CICES is now offering a membership pathway for digital engineers.
Launched at GEO Business in June 2025, this new route to membership is for digital engineers who cannot find a home in any professional institutions that match what they do in their day to day. To attract a new generation of digital surveyors and engineers, we need to change the perception of the civil engineering surveyor. Surveying is so much more than standing at the side of a road with a theodolite or dusting off the measuring wheel, it is synonymous with invention.
As our trade has evolved, so have the tools of the trade. We now use lidar to measure distances using laser beams and drone cameras to capture data rather than using pegs and ropes.
Today’s advanced geospatial instrumentation allows for complex physical measurements of radio signals from space, or from light signals, to be digitised and seamlessly integrated with other information sources to paint a more comprehensive, near-real-time view of the world.
In the age of the digital surveyor, we create detailed 3D models of the Earth’s surface and digital twins of the built environment. Meanwhile, new machine learning techniques help surveyors automatically extract highly detailed information out of complex datasets.
But surveying is also more than a job to do to get your hands on wonderful toys. While our tools have gotten sleeker and sexier, for me, the fundamentals have not changed. Being a surveyor is a career with meaning and purpose.
We need to encourage the next generation of digital natives to join our industry and help us to build the iconic structures, projects and megaprojects of the future.
Surveying is believed to be one of the world’s oldest professions, with its history stretching back to the third millennium BC and the creation of Stonehenge using peg and rope geometry.
This career is one of the world’s oldest professions because it is a fundamentally important skill for creating the built environment we live in; our roads, rail, ports, airports, homes and flood defences. It is deeply rooted in the history of human progress, creating monumental structures that range from the Great Pyramids in ancient Egypt to the Parthenon in Greece and the Colosseum in Rome.
It is a cornerstone on which the coming decades of human progress depends. Now, we need to encourage the next generation of digital natives to join our industry and help us to build the iconic structures, projects and megaprojects of the future.
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1 holdenscs.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/The-Surveying-Crisis-2-1.pdf