Australia’s construction industry needs up to 300,000 additional workers by 2027-28 to deliver a $242 billion infrastructure pipeline. It’s losing people almost as fast as it can hire them, National Association of Women in Construction chief executive Cathryn Greville told the opening Construction Leaders Panel at FCON26 in Brisbane.
Writing up the session for Inside Construction, Greville said the shortage isn’t really a recruitment problem at all. The panel ran across productivity, workforce, sustainability, procurement, AI and digital adoption, and she argued every one of those threads came back to the same place.
“Every challenge this industry faces leads back to people, not as a soft observation about culture or values but as a structural diagnosis with commercial consequences,” she wrote.
”We are filling a leaky bucket”
The standard response to a labour gap is more apprentices, more visa pathways, more school engagement. Greville says the industry needs all of that, but it won’t fix anything on its own.
“We are filling a leaky bucket,” she wrote, because “recruiting into a workplace that people leave quickly isn’t going to solve the problem”.
“We are filling a leaky bucket.”
That’s a familiar shape to anyone who has run a crew. You put on two first-years in February and by the following summer one has gone to a mate’s outfit and the other has left the trade altogether. The recruitment line in the budget looks busy. The headcount doesn’t move.
The turnover nobody puts on a progress claim
Greville put construction’s job mobility rate at 7.9 per cent, meaning nearly one in 12 workers changed employer over the past year.
“Every departure takes institutional knowledge with it,” she wrote. “The cost of losing workers is enormous.”
On a crew of a dozen, one in 12 is roughly one new face every year, and the cost of that lands squarely on the leading hand. Someone has to induct them, walk them through the sequence on that particular job, show them where the services run and which set of drawings is the current revision. That time comes out of production, and it never appears as a line item anywhere on a progress claim or a variation.
A third of licensed contractors are over 55
The demographics Greville cited are the part small business owners should sit with. A third of licensed contractors are over 55. The average age across the sector is 49. Only 6 per cent are under 30.
“A generational cliff is arriving, not in 10 years, but now,” she wrote.
In a lot of small outfits, the person holding the licence is also the person who prices the job, supervises the apprentices and knows which suppliers actually deliver. When that person retires, all of it walks out the door at once unless someone has been brought along behind them. That’s a succession question, and on those numbers it’s a question for this decade, not the next one.
Pregnancy, and the road back that isn’t there
Women make up 12.4 per cent of Australia’s construction workforce and just 3.4 per cent of its trades, NAWIC chief executive Cathryn Greville wrote in Inside Construction in August 2026.
“The biggest reason women leave construction is pregnancy,” she wrote, and once they go, the structures that would bring them back are mostly missing: flexible roles, parental leave, part-time pathways into site leadership.
“This isn’t a diversity issue; it’s a retention failure,” she wrote.
Her argument for widening the intake is a commercial one rather than a moral one. “Diverse teams make better decisions, manage risk better and deliver better outcomes,” she wrote, putting the workforce question inside the productivity agenda rather than alongside it.
The productivity problem sits upstream of the tools
Greville said construction productivity in Australia has gone backwards since 1990 while the rest of the economy grew 35 per cent.
“The problem isn’t predominantly with the tools on site,” she wrote. She pointed instead to planning decisions made too late, procurement models that reward the lowest bid and then spend years managing the consequences, and contracts built to shift risk rather than solve problems.
Subbies have been saying a version of that for years. Win it cheap, then fight over the scope for the next 18 months. The hours burned on claims and back-charges don’t show up in anyone’s productivity statistics either.
Worth flagging: this is a reflection piece by the head of an industry body, and the figures in it come without citations to the underlying reports. Official labour force data sits with the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and BCN hasn’t been able to trace the $242 billion pipeline figure or the 300,000-worker projection to a named primary document. Treat them as NAWIC’s numbers, quoted as such.
What to watch
Greville’s read on the mood at FCON26 was that governments, clients, boards and contractors are more open to changing how the industry runs than they have been before, and that the window won’t stay open forever.
Her point to the room was that most of the levers don’t need anyone else’s permission: “how you set up a contract, how you treat people in your organisation and who you put in the room when decisions get made are within your control today”.
“The industry is finally asking the right questions. Now we need the answers to stick,” she wrote.
For anyone weighing up a first-year this intake, the demand side of the argument is settled. The harder question is whether the head contractor’s payment terms and program leave you enough room to keep that apprentice for the full four years, because on these numbers, the industry can’t afford another one that doesn’t finish.
Frequently asked questions
How many extra workers does Australia’s construction industry need?
Up to 300,000 additional workers by 2027-28, according to NAWIC chief executive Cathryn Greville, to deliver a $242 billion infrastructure pipeline.
Why do women leave the construction industry?
NAWIC’s Cathryn Greville says the biggest reason women leave construction is pregnancy, and workplaces often lack flexible roles, parental leave and part-time pathways back into site leadership.
What share of licensed contractors are over 55?
About a third, according to Greville, with the average age across the sector at 49 and only 6 per cent of contractors under 30.
Sourced from Inside Construction, NAWIC. Original article.
