Australia needs more people in construction, but solving the industry’s productivity challenge will require cultural change, not just recruitment
Australia has a $242 billion infrastructure pipeline and not enough people to deliver it. That is not a projection – it’s where we are sitting right now.
The industry will need up to 300,000 additional workers by 2027-28, and the gap is already showing up on sites, in schedules, and in budgets.
Last month I joined the opening Construction Leaders Panel at FCON26 in Brisbane, alongside leaders from across the sector. The session covered productivity, workforce, sustainability, procurement, AI and digital adoption.
But a single thread ran through every topic. Every single challenge this industry faces leads back to people. Not as a soft observation about culture or values. As a structural diagnosis with commercial consequences.
Recruitment alone will not close the gap
The instinct when facing a workforce shortage is to reach for recruitment. More apprentices, more visa pathways, more school engagement programs. And yes, we need all of those, but recruiting into a workplace that people leave quickly is not going to solve the problem.
The workforce demographics tell a story the industry cannot afford to ignore. Women represent just 12.4 per cent of the sector and only 3.4 per cent of trades. A third of licensed contractors are over 55. The average age is 49. Only 6 per cent are under 30. A generational cliff is arriving, not in 10 years, but now.
The biggest reason women leave construction is pregnancy. And once they leave, the structures that would allow them to return are largely absent. Flexible roles, genuine parental leave, part-time pathways back into site leadership. This is not a diversity issue. It is a retention failure with direct commercial consequences.
The case for broadening the workforce is not a values argument. It is a performance argument. Diverse teams make better decisions, manage risk better, and deliver better outcomes. Broadening the workforce is not a social obligation sitting beside the productivity agenda. It is the productivity agenda.
The productivity problem
Construction productivity in Australia has actually fallen since 1990, while the rest of the economy grew by 35 per cent.
But the problem is predominantly not sitting with the tools on site. It is upstream, in planning decisions made too late, procurement models that reward the lowest bid and spend years managing the consequences, and contractual structures designed to transfer risk rather than solve problems.
One factor that rarely features in the productivity conversation is the cost of people constantly moving on. With a job mobility rate of 7.9 per cent, nearly one in 12 construction workers changed employer last year. Every departure takes institutional knowledge with it. Every new hire requires time to get up to speed. Those costs are real, but they never show up as a line item. The cost of losing workers is enormous.
Until the industry treats productivity as a culture and leadership challenge rather than a technology one, the record levels of investment flowing in right now will not return what they should.
The opportunity is now
What struck me at FCON26 was not the scale of the challenges, though they are significant. It was the convergence of diagnosis, and the genuine openness to change.
The scale of current pressure creates leverage for structural reform that simply was not available in quieter times. Governments, clients, boards and contractors are more willing to change how this industry operates than they have ever been. That is a genuine and time-limited opportunity.
The leaders who will emerge from this decade ahead will not simply be the ones who adopted the best technology. They will be the ones who reformed their commercial structures, built workplaces that retain people across a career, and treated delivery performance as a strategic capability rather than a project-by-project gamble.
Most of what holds this industry back gets blamed on regulation, supply chains or market conditions, forces that seem to require others to act first. But how you set up a contract, how you treat people in your organisation, and who you put in the room when decisions get made are within your control today.
The industry is finally asking the right questions. Now we need the answers to stick.
Find out more about NAWIC and our work at www.nawic.com.au
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