Unfortunately, contrary to the beliefs prevalent 50 years ago in the power of technological advancement, we're still not building on Mars and that Moon Base is still a twinkle in NASA's eyes. The failure of the future visions of the past (err, the visions the past had of our future perhaps?) means that anyone now should be very wary of making predictions: after all, it's difficult, most especially about the future.



However, accepting those caveats, it is possible to identify a few trends that are likely to impact upon construction careers a decade or two into the future. Despite there not being any Jetson's like orbiting habitats in the near future.

The first is the changing demographics of the UK. While there is indeed upward pressure on the population size from increased net immigration this really isn't the major factor increasing housing demand. It's actually two fold, that we're both living longer and that for some reason we are preferring to live in smaller households. Each succeeding decade for the past fifty years or more shows that the average number of people in a residence or dwelling falls: presumably this will stop at some point but when? It's possible, after all, for less than one person to live somewhere: that's what a second or holiday house means.

The second is the increasing mechanisation of the building process. While the influx of East European labour in recent years may have slowed this it is inevitable that more and more construction will be done in factories, merely being bolted together and then fitted out on site.

The third is to do with the availability of building land itself. There's a definite feeling (however misplaced it might be) that we don't want to lose any more countryside, so the majority of new building will be taking place on brownfield sites. This can often mean that a development is smaller than what was previously considered an economic size, filling in half an acre here, an acre there. It will also mean a huge expansion of the site remediation industry.

But perhaps the largest change is going to come from climate change. It's a well known fact that the UK building stock is some of the most emittive in Europe. This in part comes from our like of living in old houses. But if CO2 emissions are indeed to fall then some way will have to be found to retrofit such houses to higher HVAC standards.

Quite which one of these factors will be in the ascendance at any one time: well that's really something to ask the recruitment experts at Talisman. The difficulty of making predictions about the future means that we can only turn to the experts, and they can only see the immediate future clearly, the distance being for them as dimly perceived as it is for us.