Skills and resourcing for housing organisations

Experts in the housing sector discuss challenges for housing organisations in Northern Ireland, including recruitment of young people and adapting skills requirements to meet the needs of tenants in a contemporary age.

How has the skills capacity of organisations had to adapt to meet changing tenant demand?

Justin Cartwright: The pandemic worsened the outlook for recruitment and retention. It also emphasised health challenges; we have to look at what home adaptations are required to ensure that people can live in their homes independently.

Karen Gilmore: The pandemic forced us to think about what really mattered around health and social care. We are now at a re-grouping stage; we have a few green shoots coming through where we are partnering with organisations upon which we are reliant for things like maintenance. We have already looked at the skill sets in our sector before Covid, and the pandemic probably just accelerated that.

Lawrence Jackson: Before the pandemic, when we had a vacancy, we would get between 30 and 40 applications for the role. If we advertised that job now, we would get 10 applicants if we were lucky. It is not that the job is more complicated, it is that the market is much more competitive, and we are not competing against the organisations we used to for the skills that we need.

Staff are no longer just moving around within the social housing sector; they are moving out of the sector altogether. We now have to approach this problem as though we were any other employer in the market place.

Nuala Murphy: Post-pandemic, the data told us that people are re-thinking how they approach their life and their work. They are being more demanding on what they want to get out of that and one simple demand is around flexibility.

The research also tells us that for women and other groups which are under-represented, the work place was harder to progress in because of systemic inequalities – which exist in any sector – and in any industry. It is not just about a better salary, it is about a better culture. What companies need to get right is their people strategy, their culture, and how people think and feel in the organisation.

It is one thing to recruit new people through graduates and schemes, but if they land in the workplace and the trajectory is not clear, then they leave. It is about the people and culture and understanding what that looks like, committing to progress and focusing on initiatives that you are trying to build for the future.

Ciarán Sheehan: Covid has opened up a huge opportunity for the social housing sector. Board meetings have moved fundamentally online which opens up an international audience and, subsequently, a much more diverse audience. We can now easily attract people from across the UK and Ireland from other sectors. I do not think everyone quite realises the power we now have to build highly formidable boards.

If you have a recruitment process that is not agile enough to allow someone to lift a mobile phone out of their pocket and apply for a job on a short bus journey home, you will not attract the right people.

How can we convince more young people to consider working in the housing sector?

Justin Cartwright: We need to have more forums for young people to give them the ability to learn and let them have their say. There is a foundation degree due to start in September 2023, and that will be valuable in the future for recruitment because you can do it full-time over two years or part-time over three years. One of the modules is workplace learning, so if you have got existing staff where you think they could do a foundation degree then that is in the pipeline as well.

Karen Gilmore: It took three painful years to get the housing apprenticeship up and running from scratch. I do not think we do enough for young people and I think the apprenticeship route, with a decent starting salary, can provide a path for young people to come and get a flavour of what it is like to work in the sector.

I think there are good things happening now and it is about what happens next. We can see, demographically, that the age group between 16 and 24 is very under-represented in the housing sector.

Lawrence Jackson: It is partly a generational thing; when we were at school, working in social housing meant working for the Housing Executive. Young people want careers where they can make a difference and that is not sector specific.

We are, frankly, kidding ourselves if we think we will get to a stage where we will have 11-year-olds dreaming of a career in housing; that is not what is going to happen. I think the best we can hope for is for school leavers and teachers to be having a conversation when they are talking to young people about what they want, and for them to at least consider that they could realise their ambitions in housing.

That is a subtly different approach but it is the conversation we are hearing among young people. Young people want to develop their skills and fit in their communities.

Ciarán Sheehan: The next generation of workers do not want long-term careers. No-one goes in aged 17 and wants the same job for 30 years; it just does not work like that anymore.

If you have got a particular aptitude in technology, the challenge for this sector is saying that there is every bit as much an appetite for innovation and technology in social housing as there is in any other organisation. In fact, there is much less competition so you have a much better chance to flourish and you have a chance to participate in a really engaging project.

Nuala Murphy: Gen Z-aged workers are very much socially driven. They are about social purpose and development of skills and maybe not the longevity of a career. This is where you have the opportunity to present the housing sector as one which is suited to that generation because you have the diversity of the different areas of learning and stretching skills. It is also a sector where there is opportunity for them to be aligning their personal and professional goals.

You can also learn about technology with other sectors of the apprentice schemes they have done, take the good from that and apply it at scale in housing when it comes to recruiting Gen Z and help them thrive in the workplace. If you have your work culture built around diversity and inclusion then that can sell success. In the housing sector, there is a big opportunity for Gen Z recruitment because it offers a socially purpose-driven work for the future.