Saturday 7 June 2014

Construction Employment Planning and Monitoring (CEPAM)

Creating local employment is an important benefit that can be achieved to by construction projects. As well as providing work for skilled contractors, construction projects can be planned to provide work and training opportunities for local less skilled men, women, youth and people with disabilities.

Achieving this type of local beneficial impact requires planning and monitoring. Construction employment planning draws on construction knowledge and experience, design drawings, specifications and construction programmes in order to break down projects into construction tasks and the duration and levels of skills required for each of these. The duration of tasks multiplied by the number of people employed to undertake the task can be used to establish the person days of employment for each task. This process can be used to allocate work to people with different skills, women, youth and people with disabilities. Adding all of these packages of work over the full duration of the construction programme can be used to ascertain the planned employment person days for the construction project as a whole. This planned figure can be compared to benchmarks for construction employment measured in person years of employment created per Rmillion construction costs to check whether construction impact is aligned with good practice. Gauge has developed a simple tool to support this process and a snapshot from the tool is shown below.




Once the construction employment plan has been established it is important to monitor this. This can be done on a monthly basis and the number of men, women, youth and people with disabilities are recorded and checked against the projected and planned employment levels of the construction employment plan. In addition, the recording of cumulative employment days, as shown in the report below, enables overall employment impact to be tracked to ensure that targetted employment days for the project is achieved.




Gauge plans to develop the Constuction Employment Planning and Monitoring (CEPAM) tool over the next few months on a number of large construction projects and updates on the tool and methodology will be posted.