National Apprenticeship Week 2025: Building Skills For Life

With a 43-year career beginning with a bricklaying apprenticeship, Caddick Construction Group’s Managing Director, Paul Dodsworth, is a longstanding champion of work-based training in construction. This National Apprenticeship Week Paul shares his thoughts on the importance of empowering the next generation and plugging the industry’s growing skills gap.

There’s no doubt that construction apprenticeships have always played a vital role in our industry, giving people the opportunities they need to get a foot in the door. But more importantly, apprenticeships develop the next generation. They are the best way to build a skillset that is rooted in real-life experience, and this is unmatched by more traditional education routes. Apprentices learn while they earn, and the work-based skills developed in your early career set you up for life.

The experience I gained as an apprentice bricklayer made me who I am today. I was fresh into the industry and had a lot to learn, but I grew to understand the foundations of the job, as well as the challenges. I was exposed to real-life scenarios, which gave me resilience and determination. It also gave me confidence to speak up and share ideas. Those ideas were welcomed by my superiors, and that was a game changer for me.

Giving people a voice is one of the best things about apprenticeships, in my opinion. We can’t ever let our industry stagnate; we need to keep moving, changing and responding to new challenges as they present themselves. Apprentices bring new perspectives, and if they are encouraged to share their ideas and given the confidence and space to speak up, it is to everyone’s benefit.

Tackling the Skills Shortage

Just last year a Construction Skills Network report claimed that the built environment’s skills shortage had become so vast it required an extra 251,500 construction jobs filled by 2028 to meet the expected work. We have a growing pipeline, and that’s great, but this pipeline is diverse and comes with a lot of relatively new priorities, from environmental sustainability to building compliance. All of this requires new and specialist skills, from sustainable design to innovative engineering, and Building Safety Act expertise. If we take the foot off the pedal for even a moment, we’ll soon find ourselves with an even greater skills gap.

The trick here is not just investing in training, but spotting and nurturing people’s strengths. At Caddick we have a culture that prioritises aptitude and natural talent, and sets our people on a path of development that gets the best out of their individual abilities and ways of thinking. This culture is important in apprenticeship delivery. When we talk about a skills gap, we look at the data and that gives us the starting point for how many people we need in the workforce. But we need the right people; people with passion, drive and innovative thinking to shake up our industry and keep pace with the world that changes around us.

No one is in any doubt how vitally important it is to constantly evolve our apprenticeship offering, but we also need to look beyond our business to the wider industry and create a workforce that serves the bigger picture. We need to develop training that not only benefits our apprentices and our businesses, but that also benefits our industry as a whole. By opening the right doors for people, whether they are just starting out or considering a career change, we can set them on an exciting and rewarding career in construction.