Capital Pipeline Skills and Local Supply Capacity Forecaster

- Training provision can lag construction and infrastructure demand by several years. - Tier-one contractors struggle to evidence whether local capacity will exist when packages are procured. - SMEs discover opportunities only when tenders are published, leaving little time to obtain accreditations or form consortia. - Authorities report retrospective social value without knowing whether targets were deliverable. - Skills funding, supplier development and capital programmes remain administratively connected but operationally separate.

The authority or major developer should fund the core platform because it controls pipeline visibility and benefits from delivery capacity. Colleges and suppliers need free or low-friction access. Procurement, skills and project teams require different views of the same underlying forecast.

The evidence supports a coordination and forecasting problem. It does not prove that occupation-level data exists consistently in LCR's pipeline. The lowest-risk first product is therefore an analyst-assisted forecast for one project cluster, not a fully automated marketplace.

Select 10-20 projects in one sector, such as housing retrofit, transport or employment space. Obtain values, phases and likely work packages. Ask two colleges, two tier-one contractors and ten SMEs whether the 12-36 month forecast changes course planning, recruitment, accreditation or bidding decisions. Require at least two buyers to fund an update cycle.

Defensibility depends on the project-to-work-package-to-occupation mapping, local training lead-time data, supplier capability histories and feedback from actual awards. A shared forecast used by authorities, colleges and contractors creates compounding local data that generic job-posting products lack.

More local firms able to bid, training cohorts starting early enough, reduced delivery bottlenecks, more credible local-employment commitments and a stronger evidence base for the proposed academy.

Proxy based — medium confidence.

- Paid test offer: Sponsored cohort pilot: £10,000–£30,000 - Single-authority or one-sector annual licence: £25,000-£45,000. - Combined-authority regional licence: £50,000-£75,000 per year. - Initial pipeline mapping and taxonomy setup: £10,000-£25,000. - Supplier, learner and college access should be free; the portfolio owner and major delivery partners pay. - Benchmarks include SignedUp Skills at £25,000 per instance, Horsefly at £27,500 per licence and Adzuna at £5,000-£100,000 annually.

Evidence basis: Adzuna Intelligence (£5,000–£100,000 per year) is the closest verified adjacent anchor used here. Its buyer, duration and scope are not assumed to be identical; implementation is separated where the opportunity requires integration, assurance or managed delivery.

Ask one employer, training provider, combined authority or programme sponsor to fund a paid test of Capital Pipeline Skills and Local Supply Capacity Forecaster lasting 8–12 weeks, using an opening price of £10,000–£30,000 and covering one employer/programme and a cohort of 20–30 participants, roles or vacancies. Paid scope: A forward-capacity platform that ingests the capital pipeline, decomposes projects into work packages and estimates when specific trades, qualifications, apprenticeships and supplier capabilities will be required. Charge by participant, employer, sponsored cohort or regional licence and compare the fee with recruiter, adviser and programme-administration time plus existing training/placement spend. Measure completion, qualified matches, placement, time to readiness, six-month retention and adviser hours. Continue only if at least 70% complete the workflow, a material placement/retention outcome is achieved and the sponsor funds the next cohort. Stop or reprice if completion is below 50%, no hiring/retention outcome is attributable or the sponsor declines a repeat cohort.

Raise the score if a college changes provision or a contractor changes supplier-development activity based on a paid forecast. Reduce it if project work packages cannot be estimated consistently or buyers regard existing labour-market intelligence as sufficient.