The Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) serves as the industry training board for the construction sector in England, Scotland, and Wales. With a mission to support the construction industry in building a skilled, competent, and inclusive workforce, CITB focuses on three core objectives: attracting new talent to the industry, developing a comprehensive and appropriate training and skills system, and upskilling the existing workforce.
As part of its strategic efforts, CITB needed an efficient way to track labour market demand in the construction sector, and to share these insights throughout the organisation so that CITB staff would be better equipped to support the industry.
The Challenges CITB Was Facing
CITB’s process for analysing labour market data was very manual and time-consuming. It involved creating multiple monthly reports to track job listings across the UK and other regions and nations. The additional requests the wider team would make to see data from specific areas or trades added to this complexity.
There was a clear need to streamline processes, not only to make them more time-efficient but also to ensure that the labour market data was more accessible and shareable across teams.
A Strong Foundation to Build Upon: Introducing eIMPACT
Earlier this year, CITB purchased a Lightcast eIMPACT Dashboard - a visual platform that is designed to simplify data sharing and analysis. It takes just a few weeks to launch an eIMPACT website dashboard, with minimal resources and additional work from the organisation.
Creating a new dashboard is straightforward: organisations select the data points they need and the visuals and charts they would like to illustrate each data point. Then, the Lightcast team builds this dashboard, completely tailored to the organisation’s preferences.
Accessing and—above all—understanding labour market trends has never been easier. That’s why eIMPACT is ideal for organisations like CITB, which want to automate labour market data tracking and ensure that valuable insights are readily available.
Teamwork Makes Labour Market Data Work
CITB’s new dashboard has streamlined data tracking, enabling CITB to monitor job listings at regional and national levels more efficiently. This self-service tool provides visualisations that are easy to interpret and accessible to any user.
Before the dashboard's implementation, only a few team members had access to the necessary subscriptions for detailed labour market analysis. With the eIMPACT dashboard, data insights became more democratised, giving the entire analysis and forecasting team—and the broader CITB organisation—greater visibility into job market trends.
As CITB’s Customer Engagement Manager and strategic lead for construction skills in my area, one of my key responsibilities is working with partners in the skills community to develop solutions that meet the local construction skills needs. A recurring challenge we face is ensuring that the skills supply aligns with local demand. The introduction of tools like the Lightcast dashboard, alongside others such as the construction projects overview, is a game-changer. These additional intelligence sources enable me to better organise local partners and coordinate more targeted, collaborative responses to address gaps in skills provision.
What Data can eIMPACT Show?
The type of data and insights available on the dashboard are entirely up to the organisation. CITB’s own eIMPACT dashboard includes:
1. Job Listings: Construction job postings over the last five years, including both national and regional trends. Users can see job postings by occupation and region, such as civil engineers in the East of England.
2. Skill Requirements: The top skill areas required for different occupations. For instance, it can highlight critical skills for civil engineers like AutoCAD, structural engineering, and project management. This helps CITB understand the specific skill sets employers seek and adjust their training and awareness programs accordingly.
3. Experience Levels: Insights into the experience levels that employers are looking for when hiring. For example, it can show whether there is a higher demand for fresh graduates or those with 3-5 years of experience in the field.
4. Specialised Skills with High Earnings: One of the unique features developed for CITB within the dashboard includes data on specialised skills that command higher wages. This might consist of specific software knowledge or niche technical skills within the construction industry, helping stakeholders understand which skills are highly valued and may require targeted training initiatives.
Building For the Future
Introducing the eIMPACT dashboard has brought numerous benefits to CITB, from higher efficiency (saying goodbye to manual reports and reducing time and effort) to consistency in how labour market data is analysed and communicated across the organisation. This accessibility and standardisation of insights for the construction industry helps them maintain their reputation as a reliable source of information and supports stakeholder engagement.
The Lightcast dashboard has significantly reduced the time spent pulling regular reports. The visuals are really effective at a quick glance to show the trends, which is a key interest for us. The wider CITB now has that awareness, too, of the availability of the information. Having access to the dashboard really stimulates discussion and potentially increases the opportunities to query this data in more detail.
And this is just the beginning. CITB is gathering feedback from users to identify which features are most valuable and any opportunities for enhancement. As Adam Evans, Industry Analyst at CITB, commented:
We’re taking stock of how people are using it and will work with Lightcast to make it easier, more powerful, and enhance people's roles and the information we can share with our stakeholders.
Watch our webinar where we explore the dashboard with Adam and Dana from CITB.
Contact our expert team below if you want us to create a fully tailored eIMPACT dashboard for your industry or labour market needs.
💡 Check out some more of our pieces looking at eIMPACT dashboards we've built to help organisations track and share relevant labour market insights.
