The numbers published this week
The CSCS Alliance published new workforce data on 21 July. Cards issued to workers under the age of 25 rose 8.8% between 2023 and 2025, from 86,798 to 94,444. Under-25s now account for 19% of all cards issued, up from 17.2% two years earlier. That share grew while total card issuance across the whole workforce fell by 1.3%.
The growth is concentrated where the energy programme needs it. Plant Operatives saw the largest rise of any major occupation group at 24.7%. Electrotechnical Occupations grew 15.6%, and remain the single largest sector group for under-25 cards by volume. The under-25 share within Utilities rose from 13.9% to 15.5% over the same period. Growth in skilled occupations (9.6%) outpaced labouring (8.3%).
For an industry that has spent a decade being told young people will not come, this is a genuine change of direction. It is worth reading carefully before deciding what it means for resourcing.
What the data measures, and what it does not
Card issuance is not the same as workforce entry. A figure of 94,444 counts cards issued in a year, which includes renewals, upgrades and replacements, not only first-time entrants. It also counts a card, not a person on a site.
More importantly, a card issued to a 22-year-old in 2025 is, in most cases, a card at the training or entry-skilled end of the scale. The CSCS Alliance itself frames the finding as young people getting onto the right carding pathway. That is a pipeline measure. It tells you something about 2032. It tells you very little about who is available to joint a 132kV circuit in October.
The arithmetic still does not close
The National Audit Office published its report on increasing construction skills on 13 July. It found that government estimates put the additional workforce required by 2030 at somewhere between 201,000 and 755,000, and that this range is calculated before accounting for people who leave the sector for other work. The £625m construction skills package, announced in March 2025, is designed to support up to 60,000 additional workers by 2029. The package was never intended to close the whole gap, and the NAO is explicit that it does not.
Two figures from the same report are worth holding alongside the CSCS numbers. Construction has the highest rate of hard-to-fill vacancies caused by skills shortages of any sector: 45%, against a national average of 27%. And by April 2026, 74 young people had started a foundation apprenticeship, against a departmental assumption of 1,000 for 2025-26.
The NAO also notes that in 2024, employer investment in training per construction trainee was at its lowest level in ten years. Government has funded a programme; the employers who would have to absorb and train those entrants are, on the evidence, less able to than they were a decade ago.
So the picture is: entry-level interest improving, competence pipeline underperforming, and a demand gap in the hundreds of thousands. The 8.8% rise means around 7,600 more under-25 cards were issued in 2025 than in 2023. Cards, not people. Set against a lower-bound requirement of 201,000 additional workers by 2030, that is movement in the right direction at approximately the wrong order of magnitude.
What this means if you are resourcing work
The practical point for a main contractor or M&E firm is a timing one.
The workforce you will deploy between now and 2029 is already in the industry. Nothing announced in the last month changes that. Training an electrician to a competent, independently deployable standard takes years, and progressing that person to authorised HV work takes longer still. The under-25s appearing in this week's data will be useful. In the second half of the decade.
Meanwhile the demand side is not waiting. The National Grid cable framework goes live this month. SSEN Distribution appointed four overhead line framework partners on 9 July, with around £300m of investment across the first five years. SSEN Transmission's £7.4bn supply chain framework closed to prequalification submissions on 16 July. Each of those awards converts committed capital into work orders that need carded people on the ground, and they draw from the same finite population.
The competition for that population is between contractors, not between contractors and the training system. Firms that treat labour supply as a procurement line to be secured ahead of the work order mobilise on programme. Firms that start recruiting when the order lands are bidding against everyone else for people who are already committed.
Where Silvmarc fits
Silvmarc supplies pre-vetted, ECS-carded electrical operatives (electricians, HV cable jointers and associated trades) to contractors across the UK. Vetting, right-to-work checks, CIS registration and payment compliance are completed before an operative reaches site.
That does not add anyone to the national workforce. It shortens the distance between the people who exist and the sites that need them, which is the only variable a contractor can move inside a framework year.
If you are resourcing against a live framework, talk to us about labour supply before the work orders are issued.
The industry is finally recruiting its next generation. The contractor with a start date in September needs the current one.