Blueprint for the Future: Strengthening Inclusive Talent Pathways in the Built Environment

The built environment workforce is large, growing, and under significant strain. Nearly 10 million workers are employed across architecture, design, engineering, and construction (ADEC), yet persistent labor shortages, high turnover rates, and an aging managerial workforce threaten the sector’s ability to meet future demand . Construction alone needs to attract hundreds of thousands of new workers annually, and engineering fields face some of the sharpest supply-demand imbalances with job postings far outpacing the supply of new graduates in the field.

Most existing research focuses on narrow segments of the broader built environment talent ecosystem, specific occupations, sectors, or program types. While valuable, this siloed approach doesn’t account for the interrelatedness of these fields, nor does it capture the full range of opportunities and barriers that learners and workers face when exploring careers in the built environment . In seeking to inform future direction of the built environment talent ecosystem, we take a different, more holistic approach that accounts for the fact that learners often consider multiple career paths, and that movement between fields like architecture, construction, and engineering (ACE) is more fluid than traditional research suggests . Our ecosystem approach prioritized multiple inputs (i .e ., qualitative interviews, labor market data analysis, student surveys, focus groups, regional convenings) to ensure we captured the full diversity and complexity of this ecosystem.