Working together to overcome the skills shortage in housing

At CHC, we’re working on our next three-year corporate plan. Our mission is clear – to enable our members to be brilliant. As part of that work, we’ve held focus groups with our members, including two covering leadership and skills in the sector. Despite the obvious attractions of a career in housing, what has become clear through these focus groups is that we have a skills shortage in housing in Wales.

Of course, using the word ‘housing’ doesn’t adequately explain the range of opportunities that are available in housing associations from frontline housing management roles, accountants, development and construction roles, and many more.

“Using the word ‘housing’ doesn’t adequately explain the range of opportunities that are available in housing associations”

But the members who joined our focus groups reported a shortage of applicants with the right skills in development roles and a failure to grow our own talent and fill senior roles from within the middle management cohort.

Added to this was the perennial failure to sell housing as a career of choice to those from outside the sector either seeking their first job after education or at the point of a career change.

So why is that the case? Is housing perceived as old-fashioned and inflexible, as some of our focus group participants reported?

That doesn’t ring true based on my knowledge of the organisations that CHC represents.

Are we seeing an ‘arms race’ in terms of salaries for staff with specialist skills in Wales? We’ll be receiving the results of our independent salary benchmarking survey in Wales in a couple of weeks’ time and it will be interesting to see if that perception reported by our members is reflected in the statistics.

And of course, we can’t just be thinking about the present. Some reports claim that 85% of the jobs that will be available in 2030 are yet to be created, so we don’t just need to be planning for the present but the future, too.

Our vision at CHC is “Wales: where good housing is a basic right for all”, and housing associations have an ambition to build 75,000 homes by 2036. But we can’t make our ‘Housing Horizons’ ambition a reality without the right resources and capacity being available to housing associations across Wales. Our members identified skills and leadership, alongside technology and collaboration, as the foundation stones to enable them to meet their over-arching ambition and mission.

So the task for us is obvious: how do we continue to influence the policy landscape but also support members to address those challenges? Our focus groups were clear – they want to see more collaboration between housing associations in Wales to tackle difficult questions together.

"Our members identified skills and leadership, alongside technology and collaboration, as the foundation stones to enable them to meet their over-arching ambition and mission.”

The desire for greater collaboration was also one of the consistent themes in our response to the ongoing Review of Affordable Housing Supply in Wales. This doesn’t mean diluting individual organisations’ culture, mission and social purpose but sharing resources and developing new ideas together in a focused way with concrete results. It was gratifying that our members see a key role for CHC in facilitating that process. As we talk to members about our plan for the future that is the challenge we must meet.

Stuart Ropke, chief executive, Community Housing Cymru