CASE STUDY 8 SKILLSPLANNER: OPEN NETWORKED DATA TO ALIGN SKILLS AND DEMAND

SkillsPlanner is an industry-led collaborative project to develop a Linked Data construction skills platform.

SkillsPlanner will allow employers, skills providers and other stakeholders to share past, present and future skills data. The platform will integrate and interpret this open networked data, supporting stakeholders to plan for and meet current and future employment requirements and thus working to align skills supply with demand.

The aims and objectives of SkillsPlanner are to:

• Improve the understanding of skills supply and demand

• Create a better connection between skills supply and demand

A £1.3m two-year EthosVO initiative that commenced in October 2015 and is funded by Innovate UK and project partners, SkillsPlanner has over fifty-five collaborating organisations advising and engaging with its development. These collaborators represent the four main SkillsPlanner workstreams of councils, industry, training and brokerage, with over twenty key industry collaborators that include:

• Tideway

• Crossrail

• Laing O'Rourke

• Morgan Sindall

• Mace

• Class of Your Own

• Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors

• Institution of Civil Engineers

• Electrical Contracting Association

Expertise is also coming from four London councils (Camden, Westminster, Islington and Greenwich), Department of Work and Pensions and over twenty private, Further and Higher Education establishments, facilitated by the Association of Colleges. Whilst the initial focus is on the Tideway project (London), the aim of SkillsPlanner is to be the single networked platform across the industry and across the UK that enables access to current siloed construction skills data, thus enabling greater visibility of existing data and bringing a live, granular focus to skills supply and demand data.

SkillsPlanner is being built by its end users and is developing rapidly. The platform is aligning with a social enterprise jobs brokerage (BuildLondon) and working closely with Tideway contractors to standardise workforce competencies and qualifications, thus ensuring a robust 'common language' of data that will significantly boost the value that SkillsPlanner seeks to add to industry.