Abstract:

Responding to market needs is a crucial goal when we are dealing with developing skills and qualification schemes. This is especially important in this modern time, when new technologies are demanding the development and provision of new skills, and require upskilling or even prequalification of the workforce, in order to keep pace with new developments.
Therefore, this paper aims at identifying the new skills need to deal with the new trends in sustainable construction. Our work encompassed of extensive desk research in order to explore and analyze the measures toward energy efficiency, as a first approach prior to taking further direct actions toward identifying the status of required skills and competencies to enable sustainable construction. The research was toward the current status of skills in construction, their status of demand, level of awareness, and the current offer of training schemes and certification. The second part of the work targeted opinions on the necessary skills from two very different groups of respondents. The first group were the professionals from the sector and the second group provided the opinion and has “harvested ideas” directly from the end users – the home occupants and tenants. The results from these surveys together with the finding from the desk research, have provided insight into the current market need related to sustainable construction, identifying the new cross-craft skills (or skills that interrelate different occupations) that will have the highest impact and will reflect the new skills demand needed to follow the new developments toward sustainable construction. The paper presents the key findings of this research but also provides a proposal of the new curricula to respond to the new needs.

Keywords:

Curricula, new skills, market need, survey.