Employers continue to require specialised skill sets, so the deficit of skilled labour will continue to put pressure on recruitment. Whilst this will be somewhat alleviated by over 50s returning to the jobs market as the cost of living rises, this will not fix the skills gaps in the sector which have only widened since the pandemic started and older talent began leaving the workforce at a higher rate than usual. Funding for training and development schemes for young people will also continue, as well as moves towards incentivising them into more specialised vocational roles from 16 onwards.

Going into 2023, many businesses are holding the line to “wait and see” before making any decisions that may drastically affect hiring, whilst bracing for further global economic turbulence. Recruitment will continue to be a significant challenge for businesses in the coming months, both in terms of cost and candidate availability. Despite this, the mood across the FM and recruitment sectors seems to be optimistic into 2023.

Number of Vacancies Falls

Vacancies reached near 50-year highs in 2022 as employers raced to return to pre-pandemic levels of staffing. The number of open jobs on the market started to fall from Q4 of 2022, but not at the rate that might be expected given the current economic outlook. The candidate market for FM roles is still tight, and candidates are still being offered multiple roles at once and taking their pick. Employers will need to work closely with their recruitment partners to trust recruiters to advertise their company, values, culture and benefits to the candidates, and make swift decisions to ensure they get their first choices.

Retention and Changing Hiring Strategies

Retention will be a strong focus for many businesses over the next year. Employers should consider developing their employee benefits package for current and potential employees. These will feed into recruitment and retention initiatives to improve workplace culture.

Talent planning will also be a focus for 2023 as the recruitment market expects to be impacted by businesses cutting back on hiring and in effort to decrease costs. We expect to see caution from businesses around taking on new staff, particularly if economic growth forecasts are perceived to be wrong and recession lengthens. However employers still have gaps to fill post pandemic, and as we can see from the amount of vacancies (which is not decreasing in any substantial way) they still want to take on those staff.

FM is on the front line for many businesses and with energy efficiency and maintenance being a focus for businesses in 2023, it is likely to maintain its reputation as a stable market. This means recruitment in the sector is not likely to decrease as much as in other sectors. The problem is still candidates, and a whole sector approach is needed to look at bringing people into the sector and how to tackle creating more skilled FM professionals.

Hybrid Working and Workplace Culture

Flexible working has become a must, as many employees expect that they will get flexibility in their role to work the hours they are contracted in a way that has less impact on their home lives. People want the power to arrange their own schedule in order to balance their lives more effectively. Employers need to consider how they can use hybrid and flexible working to improve their employer branding and employee retention strategies.

Another focus for employers will be their company culture - what it looks like to potential candidates, and how they can better market themselves to various talent pools. Part of this strategy will need to be how company culture is driven from within, including how a new recruit is introduced to the company, ensuring that onboarding and induction processes are inclusive and welcoming. In the current market where talent can be more selective and three quarters of young people are willing to pull out of poor hiring processes, it is crucial to get those first impressions nailed.

Recruitment Partnerships

We work closely with our clients on how they can improve their hiring processes and candidate experience. One of the barriers to hiring for large corporations is the time it takes to fill a role. The recruitment process can sometimes be long, and may cause candidates to become frustrated, but particularly in the current market, companies can lose out to smaller, more agile competitors who are able to complete the process more quickly. Speeding up the recruitment process where possible is beneficial for everyone involved: clients are able to fill gaps in the workforce more quickly, and candidates feel valued when starting in a new role.

Property and Construction

Housebuilders look to be working on completions only for at least part of 2023 over taking on sites to build from scratch. Market instability in 2022 and high inflation has meant mortgages are going up whilst demand has dropped, meaning house prices are falling too.

Demand for new buildings in the commercial sector has dropped too as occupancy in offices has decreased. Discussions over the way office space is used will continue into 2023. The difficulty for businesses is being completely flexible when their office may not have desk space for all employees to be in at once. Businesses with too large office space that goes unused for 4 days a week (Thursday to Tuesday) are wondering whether to hold onto the full space or whether to downsize and reduce costs.

Building Retrofits, Insulation and Energy Use

Due to the energy price shocks of 2022, this year will see an increased focus on building retrofits to create more sustainable, energy efficient buildings across the commercial and residential built environment. This will also affect CAFM use, with FM’s turning to technology to get the best out of their buildings. Use of sensor technology and other hardware will likely increase, as will investment in software to manage this.

FM’s will be expected to propose and undertake planned preventative maintenance and retrofitting to ensure energy is not being wasted to keep costs down in commercial buildings and the common areas of high rises. There will also be a greater focus on Scope 1-3 emissions, net-zero, carbon reduction and other sustainability targets, as all of these will help to reduce energy usage in company lifecycles, bringing down costs.

Green Skills and the Sustainable Revolution

As renewable energy became a focus of 2022, more attention was thrown on the jobs and skills that would be needed for a sustainable revolution in energy. Various government and industry research has looked at this issue, highlighting the following jobs in:

• 600,000 heat pumps will have replaced gas boilers by 2028, needing skilled engineers. The government has injected funding into training courses, but “a recent study [from BESA] found that 46,000 workers would need to be trained and £150 billion invested in the South East alone to bring homes to the necessary standards of energy efficiency” to reach governmental net-zero targets by 2050.
• Offshore wind is a key component of the government’s energy decarbonisation strategy.
• EV manufacture and servicing will require more skilled labour, as will the infrastructure expansion that is needed in the coming years.
• There will also be increased need for specialist labour on building retrofits, including window retrofits (double /triple gazing and trickle vents, other ventilation), solar panels, sensor technology, insulation and cladding.
• In the application of sensor technology, the FM industry will need more data analysts and possibly data scientists to improve the use of the data and the efficiency of the estates they manage. There will be an increase of AI usage to improve energy monitoring and create automated processes to provide smart systems that can notify or adjust energy usage to optimise it.
• Projects around clean hydrogen production, carbon capture and storage, and biomass fuels will all feature in the coming years, with a wealth of jobs created at every level to fulfil these plans.
• Battery technology is already being touted as one of the ways we can work to store energy for later use when a surplus is created. Innovations in this area will provide jobs across the UK and FM sector.
• Large infrastructure projects around protecting against possible natural disasters will need a workforce of people to create, manage and implement these plans.

The FM industry is and will continue to be at the forefront of implementing many of the sustainable strategies for businesses, giving the industry further prominence. 2023 will likely see more need for FM in many areas, but once again, particularly when it comes to sustainability. Many parts of the general FM remit such as asset and lifecycle management and PPM will be viewed more now with a sustainability lens as ways to save money in the business as they future proof their estates.