Save the Career Changers Project

The Career Changers project is a 2.5 year programme that was funded by CITB to increase the amount of women working in the construction industry. Encon understood that sustainable change meant tackling the route causes around the lack of diversity and therefore built a programme that not only supported women to join and retrain in construction, by offering a supported training programme, secured work and fair pay - not apprenticeship rates, but also supported our leaders and managers to build a culture that was conducive to attracting women, offering unconscious bias and agile organisation training and developing a mentoring scheme that supports women throughout the entirety of their career. 

This programme is now under threat with CITB saying that they cannot afford to continue to pay - even though the project was ringfenced from a 2018 budget. At the same time CITB are continuing to offer a fund of 3million pound to support leadership and management training for companies with over 250 staff - that will have sufficient resource internally to deliver this. In Wales where this project is currently being delivered L&D training up to level 7 is being provided for free through the Upskilling fund so this fund is not strategically being prioritised.

If CITB funded 1 less Large company it would allow our project which is half way through delivery to continue. 

CITB CEO Sarah Beale recently made a public statement where she said that 'A diverse industry will be needed to make sure we recover from the impacts of Covid 19 and that Encouraging diversity will be a major consideration as we review our funding options in the coming months'. We believe this is an act of performative action to appease onlookers, with CITB not demonstrating this commitment in their actions. 

We are asking industry today to sign this petition and show your support  in demanding that CITB to reconsider their approach and continue to fund an important and successful diversity programme for Wales.