The Wow Show - live 20 minutes

Welcome to the Wild Show! You see this, there's more to it than you think. If you go through all the layers, it's basically just mud underneath. And all these new buildings and roads... I'm not getting on this thing. This bridge, pretty good, no? Just a few years ago, it didn't even exist. I don't know about you, but I take a lot of this stuff for granted. If you think about it, everything you see around you, your roads, homes, school, colleges, have to be designed, planned and built. I mean, right from the first sketch to this. So, what do you think that takes? Yeah, right. Some doing. A lot of skilled people doing a lot of interesting stuff. Like this. From a day in the office via mistaken identities to a look into the future. And there's way more coming up. What's in the building? More than you think. So, as you can see, a building is much more than just four walls and a roof. It can change the way we think about where we work and live. Starting a career in construction makes you part of all of this. I'm Jessica Lee and I achieved the civil engineering apprenticeship at J. Murphy & Sons. I found the apprenticeship is like a stepping stone in a career, which I really wasn't supposed to start off. I wanted to go into marketing, but it stepped me off in the right direction as being an engineer. I didn't want to go to university. I didn't want to get in debt. So, I thought the best route for me was to go through the apprenticeship route. Throughout the day, I'm either in the site office or on site. I might be setting out foundations or piles or one day I might do some track monitoring and then I may spend like a whole day in the office just catching up with paperwork. So, it varies each day. One of the biggest challenges was coming onto a site and working with a load of lads and trying to get them to take you seriously. People feel very intimidated by working around men. I just feel like more women should come into the industry with an open mind. It's shaped my future really well. I've been on some really good projects and I've met some really good people and I've been nominated for awards. It's kind of made me the person I am today and I feel like I want to go higher up the ladder. Offshore and renewable energy is going to be something that's central to our lives. There's loads of awesome tech being designed and constructed for it. Here at the Port of Bly, different companies welcome some pretty epic projects like working with offshore renewable wind power and laying cables under the ocean to connect the UK and Norway. I mean, how is that even possible? Giant subsea trenches, that's how. And they're all remote controlled. Let's check it out. IHC design and build offshore pipeline equipment which can range from the towers that take the pipeline and lay it on the seabed and then the subsea vehicles which can be used to plough trenches and bury the pipeline. This is a control cabin for a subsea trencher plough that lays equipment on the seabed to facilitate energy transfer. ORA Catapult, it's a renewable energy offshore company. Suppliers will send in different parts that they might want tested and we do it for them. At the Port, we've got four different areas. Sometimes it can be on, like, say, in the warehouse. I could be unloading ships, project cargo, bulk handling, loading trains, anything really, it's a variety of stuff. Getting these turbines built in the middle of the ocean and linking them with deep sea cables takes a lot of coordinating, meaning a lot of construction roles and apprenticeships. At school, it was either you go to university or you go to college, it wasn't do apprenticeships. So at college, all you did was work-related stuff, it was all paper-based, it wasn't ever anything practical, where this apprenticeship, you get to do the practical side of it and you do get to go to college as well. When you first start off as an apprentice, it isn't the best period, but you have to think you're learning, you're trying to learn your trade. It all depends where you work, but my wage got troubled from being an apprentice to where I am now. Prior to this, I was thinking a job's a job, you know, you just do it just to live, really, to earn some money. But now I do enjoy getting up in the morning and coming to work, which I suppose that's the biggest part for me. We all want a great future, so have a think about getting into this. Because whatever your grades, skills or interests, whatever your personality, or however you look at things, and whether you like working with these, these, or these, there are so many different roles to choose from, and loads of training opportunities to help launch you into an exciting career. So whether you want to work here, here, or here, in construction, the opportunities are endless. Here's a question for you. What do you think the average construction worker looks like? Are you imagining someone with a high vis and a hard hat? You might be surprised. What do you hate? I was going to say people, but that's a bit unsociable, isn't it? Does your job involve telling people what to do a lot? Probably not a necessity, but I do it anyway. What did you do at uni? A degree. Do you have to have like, oh, what's that called? Yeah, high vis, like that thing. It depends where I am. Do you need a degree to do your job? I wouldn't say you would need a degree to do my job, no. What did you do at uni? I haven't been to uni. Have you discovered any new skills, and what are they? How to carry off a hard hat and big boots. Do you like everyone you work with? I do. I was a bit worried going into construction as a girl, but I was very welcomed. Would you change anything about your job? Yeah, I'd start later so I could have a really long lie-in. Are you well paid? I believe I am well paid, yeah. What's one thing that you hate? Uh, I hate litter. I hate seeing litter in the streets. Does some of your colleagues work higher up? Yeah, a lot of my colleagues work higher up, yeah. Physically, physically higher up. Oh, not metaphorically. I think electricity's fine. Yeah, I think number two is quantity, so. Yeah, but I think number one's create an operator because the shoes are dirty. Okay, so one is one, two is three. And your time's up. Number one, were we right? Afraid not. Number two, were we right? Sorry, no. Number three, were we right? Yes, you were. Number four, were we right? You were. Number five, were we right? No. What are the right boards? I think the biggest surprise is you. I just didn't see it, you know? It's not what you'd expect. Yeah. I saw one of them, maybe. No, that does fit. I didn't see those two come in. It's because I thought you might be create an operator. But like, electricians, that's fair. It just surprised me. I think he had a really good point, that you're juggling emails. So you must get it on emails. You seem like you could be in charge. I'd say that's a good thing. Also, we thought because you are just out of state of form, you might be assistant. I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, assistant with a QM. So, how did you do? Tricky, right? There's no formula for working out the obvious person for a role. Because, well, there's no such thing as the obvious person. It can be anyone. There are so many opportunities. You could be flying drones or working with AI. We went to Glasgow to find out more. We were providing an opportunity for industry to invest in innovation. We've got machinery from robotics to 3D printing. This sort of technology is starting to filter its way into the construction industry. 90% of the Scottish housing is timber frame manufactured. A lot of that now is off-site. Off-site manufacturing is when you built elements of houses inside a factory environment that you can just crane into place rather than building it all from scratch on site. There's such a wide range of job opportunities, much more than just necessarily standing in a field with a shovel in the rain and the wind. We have interns and workers from physics backgrounds, from maths, doing really, really detailed, really accurate work that you wouldn't necessarily have considered construction. We bridge the gap between academia and industry. There's a lot of research getting done in universities and what we do is we make sure that all the research that's getting done actually has real-life impact. At the moment, we're doing a lot of work within housing and that's to make sure that the houses are built with low carbon, more sustainably, that they cost less to live in and that they are built of a high quality and better affordability. An interesting project we're working on at the moment is insulation using recycled cleaning waste. So that's the products used in the cleaning process can actually be chopped down, made insulation and put back in the houses that they were originally cleaning. We have an event coming up where we're looking at collaborating with space tech and it's how satellites can impact upon the construction industry. We're looking to get the best from other industries and bring it into this industry and see how that can help us develop. You can certainly come in as a graduate. You can also come in as an apprentice as well. You don't necessarily have to go to university to get a good career within this industry. A lot of the most successful people joined as apprentices and worked their way up. Coming from school, you don't hear about off-site manufacturing a lot. I've learned a lot in here. I've probably learned more day-to-day handling of it than I would at uni. Regardless what your teachers say, uni isn't always the be-all, end-all. I do think there's a lot of different routes you can go down. In the future, I think it will be important for people to have a good set of skills related to technology. There'll be job roles out there that don't exist at the moment, the same way that the job I'm doing didn't exist when I started studying. I think we'll have a lot more females working within the industry. I think we'll attract younger people because it'll be seen as a more technology-advanced industry. Change has been progressing slowly and we're now seeing a real upturn in the rate that's going at. So it'll definitely look different in five to ten years. My name is Gabe Lynch and I was a commercial apprentice for Barrett Developments. Coming into the apprenticeship, I'd done my GCSEs, I went to college for a bit, but decided an apprenticeship was something that I wanted to pursue and was really interested in. The pay is actually quite good and I think people coming straight out of school, having that regular pay coming in is absolutely great and if you go into college, that's all paid for so you can do both of those things at the same time. Working in the buying team, we look after the procurement of all sorts of different materials for construction projects. Coming into it, I thought I'm going to be an apprentice, I'm probably going to be doing filing and not really getting involved but when I got in there and started on my apprenticeship, they just started throwing more and more things at me to do, which was a great way of learning. Before, I wouldn't have been able to speak on the phone to somebody with confidence but now I could pick up the phone and quite happily speak to somebody about a construction-related subject. I won the CITB Apprentice of the Year for Great Britain award which was just amazing to be recognised for all the hard work that you do put in. It was a really proud moment. I've just started doing the university programme through Barrett's as well, which is great so I'd like to complete that and then I'd just like to progress through to management. I think it's just a great industry to be in. If I could go back, I'd definitely push myself towards an apprenticeship. It's such a great experience, it's a fantastic way to start your career. Home, it's different for everyone but it's not always a straightforward path to finding one. Today, overcrowded cities and lack of affordable housing make owning a home seem like licking your elbow. Impossible, we need more houses. So how do we turn this into a home? And not just one, what about a whole new town? But these homes have to do a lot more than just put a roof over people's heads. Yeah, like what? What makes a home a home and a town a town? If you were designing a brand new town like Sherford, what would you want it to be like? So let's find out how the people who built this went about it. Could you do better? What goes into planning a town? A huge amount. So there's years and years and years of preparation work that goes into planning. They look at how the houses are laid out, how the environment is going to work, how the community is going to work together and then when the residents start to move in, that's what really makes it a town. And how many homes are being built here? Five and a half thousand in total. What do you think makes a house a home? It all starts to look like a home once we start to add the nice things like the tiling and the carpets and the kitchens and then obviously people's own personal stamp when they move in. I'm here with Owen, the site manager, to find out a bit more about what's going on here at Sherford. What sort of opportunities are there for people wanting to work in construction? Oh, the opportunities are huge. We look at anybody and everybody when it comes to taking on people in construction. And what sort of qualities would you look for in people you were looking to employ? What we look for is people who are driven, focused, wanting to maybe learn something different, something they might not be able to learn. We want people to be informed better at school level that the construction industry is a good opportunity where they can earn really good money. Why did you want to be an apprentice? I've been a chef for 15 years, about time to give that up, so I decided to retrain as a carpenter. What's your favourite part of the apprenticeship and the training? Lunch break. No, it's the carpentry. It's definitely the carpentry work and the wood. I've had a great passion for it. What was your pathway into the job? I went down to the college to find out about apprenticeships and then they pointed me towards Sherford. What advice would you give to young people who might want to get into this industry? Definitely consider it because, you know, there's a lot of different options when you leave in school and stuff, but a trade, you can't go wrong with a trade really. It's guaranteed work pretty much for the rest of your life. What's it like being a woman in construction? It's no different actually. I get treated the same as everybody else. I think that if you can prove that you can do the job, then you earn your respect that way. So being female doesn't really make any difference at all. And how do you think we can encourage more women to get into this industry? And it's about getting children out to have a look for themselves to see that it's not such a scary environment to be in. Yeah, it's a massive job. You have to think about pretty much everything, from the big things like the overall town plan to even door handles. And then you have to build it. Imagine designing something like this and then seeing it finished with people living in it. It's like your town. Not many people can say they created a town. So what would be your favourite part of designing a town? Let me guess, the sewage system, right? Okay, maybe not. But sewers are kind of important. I mean, someone's got to sort out what we flush down the loo. Did you know that London's current sewage system is 150 years old? And it was built for a population less than half of the size of what it is now. That's why there are currently thousands of people being employed to redesign and build it. Let's see what they're getting up to. So there you have it. We've tried to give you a look at working in the world of construction. What do you think?