The first and most obvious one is that the Olympics are coming and while everyone's desperately hoping that they won't be the usual financial nightmare they are also hiring construction managers as fast as they can to try and make sure that it won't be. Given that this is government work though that hope might still be in vain.

The second on is a little more subtle. We all know from the Daily Mail (and of course industry experience) that the country is awash with Polish plumbers and Czech chippies but this very expansion of a low cost workforce increases the demand for managers in two ways. The first is the obvious one that more workers means more managers. The second and less obvious is that a lowering of the costs of labour means that there's more money to go somewhere: obviously this isn't going to the buyers in the form of lower prices and similarly, some of it is spilling over into the hiring of those specialist managers that everyone's always had a hankering for but could never really afford before.

The third thing driving the increased demand for construction managers is the way in which the industry is becoming ever more complex. Where health n' safety used to mean hard hats and decent scaffolding there are now dedicated managers on every site tasked with nothing other than making sure the detailed rules are followed. Similarly, the increasing complexity of environmental regulation is meaning greater demand for such specialists. Whether such detailed rules are really needed is another matter but there can be no doubt that they're driving up the demand for skilled managers in the construction industry.

We at Talisman also have another source of information of course. As experts in the sourcing and provision of managers to the construction industry we can see what demand is simply by monitoring what is crossing our desks. As we as recruitment specialists are, well, as you might think is obvious, recruiting people for the industry, we can see that demand is going up when our clients are tasking us with finding more such managers. The answer here is, yes, there is indeed strong demand for those looking for construction management jobs.