Building the Lifting Industry’s future workforce
Matt Barber, Director of Membership at LEEA, introduces the Association’s campaign launched during GLAD2025 to celebrate the lifting professionals who power progress, protect lives and build the future.
Lifting is everywhere but is rarely recognised. Our job at LEEA is to change that. We launched our ‘Shining a light on the Industry that holds the world up’ campaign during GLAD2025, to elevate visibility and the importance of lifting operations, to shine the light on the work and the people behind it, whose skills are critical and whose safety must ultimately be protected. These are careers that should be celebrated.
To support this campaign LEEA has launched its new microsite leealiftingfutures.com as we build a bridge to the future workforce by addressing the skill shortages in the industry, the awareness and the pathways and focus on education and inspiring that next generation. Through this initiative, hosted on leealiftingfutures.com, LEEA is working to raise awareness, attract fresh talent and support the entire industry in building a stronger, more sustainable future. This is an evolving website, which will be continually updated and we encourage our members to contact us to be featured in the case studies.
Real world lifting in the classroom
We need to start young, so we have launched a series of education workshops that are not just theory- or textbook-based, but practical, hands-on interactive workshops to teach the principles of safe lifting operations. We’ve partnered with specialist STEM educators and engineers at Tablet Academy, which has a global network, to provide a practical and interactive programme that brings real-world lifting and engineering concepts into the classroom.
Sphero Blueprint Build kits are used to help students to learn engineering principles by building cranes, constructing mechanisms to focus on safe working loads, focusing on centres of gravity, ensuring that lifting operations can be planned and checked effectively, and performing tasks in the safest possible way.
During the pilot programme, over 250 students took part across four workshops, with 85% saying they now know more about the lifting industry from their workshop experience. Moreover, the vast majority really enjoyed it, particularly building structures and mechanisms relating to safe lifting operations. 65% of the students in attendance said problem solving was the main skill they developed throughout the workshop, and nearly half said they would now consider a career within the industry. This is significant.
LEEA members can directly support this initiative through downloading the resources available at leealiftingfutures.com, but also by working with their local schools and communities to hold these workshops and donating the Sphero Blueprint Build kits. This isn't just about corporate social responsibility, it’s building a talent pipeline for the future.
Alongside these workshops, we have created a series of curriculum-friendly teacher resources to ensure the impact of the programme moves forward into the future years of pupil educational paths as they enter Year 7, 8 and 9.
In addition, we have produced an Educational Landscape Document, which illustrates how young people going through the educational programmes can enter a career in the Lifting Industry. This is also available at leealiftingfutures.com.
Using the knowledge existing within our Regional Councils of Australia and New Zealand, the Middle East and South East Asia, the document brings together a global framework of what each educational landscape looks like and how members and organisations across the industry can work with their local schools to provide pathways into the industry.
Resources for businesses and individuals
The leealiftingfutures.com microsite contains an array of practical resources for businesses and for individuals. It speaks to those seeking a career in the industry if they’re at school, looking at an apprenticeship or looking at direct employment or upskilling their current skills. The site is also a must visit for individuals with transferrable skills, who might be experienced and see a career in the Lifting Industry as being highly valuable.
Through this microsite we want to highlight the careers and the roles and the responsibilities of individuals currently in the industry. But more importantly, we want to show how our members and businesses can tap into that talent and how we can connect the dots and all of the work that LEEA does globally, to bring through this new generation of talent.
The site will feature case studies illustrating the work our members worldwide carry out on a day-to-day basis. They demonstrate the importance of their work to the Lifting Industry, as well as the impact the industry has on society.
Ultimately safety is behind all of our work to attract more people into the industry. And this isn't just procedural safety, but cultural safety: the importance of continual development, the importance of creating that behaviour and that mindset around the safety first approach.
Everybody should see safety as their responsibility. All of our campaigns and all of our resources promote both technical safety aspects – the laws, the standards, inspections – and the human safety element in terms of behaviours, judgement and culture. Real safety lives in the habits of people, not just on a checklist. This is what we need to see every single day to make sure that all lifting operations are as safe as possible.
Continued development
A lack of Continued Professional Development (CPD) was a major cause of skills gaps, according to 46% of the organisations that took part in the State of the Lifting Industry survey, which can be downloaded at leealiftingfutures.com. Furthermore, 21%, said their lifting operators did not feel safe within their roles. These are two significant statistics that we really need to take forward and address.
Investing in the long term capability of your workforce is where our CPD framework steps in. LEEA has built a knowledge, skills and behaviours framework, which is an approach aligned with global best practice and embedded into all of our training courses and pathways. Every workshop, training and CPD framework is rooted in the value of LEEA membership.
Influencing our ‘Shining a light on the Industry’ campaign is the fact that every near miss, every accident, every lost day, starts with something that wasn’t done, something skipped, something postponed, something not known. Now we know what the issues are and we have built the tools that will solve them. Join us in our campaign and find out more at: leealiftingfutures.com.
