The ripple effect of the digital and green skills demand in the built environment
Posted on: 17 December, 2025
By Nick Perkins
Head of Built Environment Futures Assembly
The University of the Built Environment recently launched the Built Environment Futures Assembly (BEFA) – a leadership forum designed to strengthen competency and technical capability across the sector. With the surge in demand for digital and green skills in the built environment sector, the head of BEFA, Nick Perkins, examines the ripple effects on educators, professional bodies, regulators and employers.
Watch a video outlining this topic from Mark Farmer, BEFA Chair and author of influential government reviews into built environment skills, ‘Modernise or Die’ and ‘Transforming the Construction Workforce’.
Learning providers
Universities and training providers need to refresh curricula to reflect digital practice, sustainability, and integrated delivery. This means embedding model-based workflows, data literacy, and systems thinking into core programmes. It also means using problem-based, multidisciplinary projects that mirror real-world practice, and assessing collaboration and judgement rather than individual technical output. Degree apprenticeships and modular learning can help learners build competence in real settings while acquiring cross-disciplinary awareness.
Professional bodies
Institutions should update competency standards to include digital, green and collaborative skills, whilst exploring common core competencies across disciplines to reduce duplication and clarify expectations for learners and employers. Where accountability spans multiple professions, bodies can work jointly on guidance so that duty holder roles remain clear and members understand how to evidence safe, effective practice in integrated teams.
Regulators
Rules should enable innovation while protecting safety. Regulations, guidance and approval processes must recognise modern methods and digital evidence so that new techniques and tools can be adopted with confidence.
Proportionate declarations of competence for higher risk work will strengthen assurance without imposing unnecessary burden and procurement or funding models that reward quality, whole-life value and learning rather than lowest initial cost will reinforce the right behaviours across supply chains.
Employers
Firms should treat workforce development as a strategic priority. Mapping skills against current and forecast work, then funding targeted upskilling, will help align capability with demand.
Early-career pathways benefit from rotations and supervised exposure to real-world decisions, enabling new entrants to build both breadth and depth. Recognising and rewarding learning that improves outcomes will embed a culture of continuous improvement. At the same time, clear role profiles and human-in-the-loop checks will maintain assurance as digital tools become more pervasive.
How BEFA can help
Collaboration, shared language and evidence-based change run through all of this. The sector wastes effort when each actor solves the same problem alone. We need joined-up frameworks and practical tools that can be adopted with minimal rework.
BEFA exists to convene and catalyse, so it can:
- Host roundtables that bring together educators, employers, professional bodies, and regulators to agree on common priorities.
- Publish short, practical guidance on curricula refresh, competency modernisation and proportionate assurance.
- Share evidence of what works so others can quickly adopt proven approaches.
Read our previous articles
- How will our new built environment forum create a future-ready industry? – University of the Built Environment
- Preparing for disruption: how AI is reshaping professional services – University of the Built Environment
- Strengthening competency and technical capability in the built environment – University of the Built Environment
