CFMA: Talent Pipelining

Contractors will face continually worsening talent shortages through 2030.

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Those that want to continue sustainable growth must manage every aspect of their talent management processes with the same rigor they would manage a fast-track project with $100K per day in liquidated damages.

The Construction Talent War - Talent Pipelining.

On November 15th, Katie McConnell and David Brown kicked-off the first of a three-part series focused on talent.   

  1. Diagnosing the Biggest Talent Bottlenecks for CFMA Sacramento Members
  1. Fixing Your Biggest Talent Bottlenecks
  1. Building Benefit Packages and Perks Beyond Compensation for a Competitive Advantage 

A few interesting takeaways from the first session were:

  • When asked what their hiring challenges were, nearly 100% of the audience cited external market factors, which included the shortage of talent. To begin solving the problem, we must first start looking inwardly at the areas they can control and, more specifically, those that matter
  • Of the 83% of people who stated their challenge was not enough qualified talent, 50% of those also rated their Talent Pipelining process as effective (an ‘A’ or ‘B’). This is a little bit like stating your sales process is effective but not achieving the sales you want.  

The next step in solving a problem is to recognize that we may be looking at our internal processes and capabilities with more rose-colored glasses than we think. We actually may not even know what we don’t know. 




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Always be conservative, forthright and provide a clear roadmap to successful project delivery. The biggest thing you want to avoid are changes during construction or delays. Both will impact the income projections and possibly project viability.
Quote about Winning - Bob Knight
There is an excitement about winning and definitely a need to instill that vision and passion in your team. This however is just the top of the mountain and reaching the summit is momentary. It's the discipline of preparing to win that is critical.
Continuous Improvement: Plan, Do, Check, and Act (PDCA)
Improving productivity in construction is exceptionally challenging. It must be embraced as a journey and not a destination. It must be made into a game so that people clearly see what winning looks like and fall in love with the process.