Construction Youth Trust trustee: skills pipeline lessons for project teams
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
Julie White, managing director of diamond drilling and concrete sawing specialist D-Drill & Sawing, has been appointed a trustee of social mobility charity Construction Youth Trust. She will help connect young people from low-income and underrepresented backgrounds with employers across the construction sector, drawing on experience running a subcontractor where around 80% of the workforce began as apprentices. White also sits on the Government’s Construction Skills Mission Board, tasked with delivering a workforce action plan to recruit 100,000 new workers annually until 2029.
Technical Brief
- D-Drill & Sawing operates as a specialist diamond drilling and concrete sawing subcontractor with nationwide offices.
- White’s trustee role targets young people from low-income and underrepresented groups facing barriers to site employment.
- Construction Youth Trust’s remit includes brokering direct connections between candidates and construction employers, not just awareness-raising.
- As former Build UK chair, White backed the Open Doors campaign, organising live workplace tours for young people.
Our Take
The United Kingdom features heavily in our 815 Infrastructure stories, but Construction Youth Trust is one of the few pieces centred on workforce pipeline rather than physical assets, signalling that labour capacity is becoming as newsworthy as project delivery.
Julie White’s 80% former-apprentice workforce at D-Drill & Sawing positions her as an outlier in our database, where most UK contractors still report only modest proportions of staff coming through formal apprenticeship routes, giving her practical credibility on skills policy up to 2029.
Links to Build UK and the Open Doors initiative mean Construction Youth Trust is now embedded in the same ecosystem that shapes site-access schemes for young people, which in our coverage often determines whether skills initiatives translate into actual placements on live projects.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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