About the MHA+ Skills Community

The MHA+ Skills Community has a broad remit. This includes offering construction and highways-specific learning, training and development opportunities, and improving access to approved professional development schemes, working with partners such as the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) and the Transport Planning Society (TPS).

The Skills Community helps build the capacity and capability of the existing workforce, to help address the skills shortages the construction industry expects to face. By enhancing development opportunities and working with others, we aim to inspire a diverse range of talented people to join the construction industry.

Activities include community and school engagement projects, organised in collaboration with our framework suppliers.

In 2015, the Midlands Highways Alliance achieved accreditation from the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) as a Client Based Skills Academy.

What is the Client Based Approach?

The CITB worked with the construction industry to draw up a guide to the skills outputs that could be applied to particular types and values of construction projects. This became known as the Client Based Approach. The guidance includes benchmarks, giving developers confidence that their employment and skills requirements are both proportionate and achievable. These benchmarks are set across construction, repairs and maintenance, and highways projects.

While we’ve moved on from being a Client Based Skills Academy, we’ve retained many of the benchmarks, along with the use of an Employment and Skills Plan.

Framework suppliers, MHA+ members and professional bodies work together to build the skills of their staff, their supply chains and local communities.

The MHA+ Employment and Skills Plan (ESP) forms part of our social value strategy. It boosts skills and ensures construction projects support initiatives that meet learning and development needs and address skills gaps. We’ve incorporated activities based on national best practice, as well as those developed by the CITB, into the ESP.

An ESP is completed for each eligible scheme on the MHA+ framework (schemes with a target price over £1 million). This sets out how the scheme will support skills development across 14 activity areas.

MSF3 & MSF4 provided data that gave an overview of how schemes are building social value (BSV). The BSV template can be downloaded from the secure MHA+ Information Sharing Platform (PDF, 476KB).

We monitor and evaluate the achievements of our framework suppliers, and provide a scheme summary infographic for MSF 3 & 4 schemes.