Matt Dicks reports on the findings of a survey of CIH Cymru members on professionalism in housing.
In the last edition of WHQ I told you about the Chartered Institute of Housing’s project that aims to reconnect the sector with its tradition of professionalism.
A central driver of that project is to put down on paper what it means to be a housing professional – creating a Professional Standards Framework which identifies the core competencies we need to have, at each stage of our career, that will allow us to identify ourselves ‘professionals’.
One of the key issues we are trying to address through this project is the lack of recognition that housing has as a profession – the ‘housing professional, what’s that?’ response when we tell people what we do for a living.
That is annoying and utterly disheartening in equal measure, particularly when you consider the positive impact that we have, as a profession, on the lives of thousands of people on a daily basis.
But on a more practical level, it makes it difficult for all of us, and CIH as the sector’s professional body, not just to go out and sell our profession as an option to schools, colleges and career advisers up and down the country, but also to retain valued people and skillsets within our sector.
Since I started in post three-years-ago, I have received a lot of anecdotal evidence that CIH Cymru should be doing more to create better retention rates of valuable skilled staff – quite simply, we don’t want to see skilled housing professionals leaving our sector.
We therefore undertook a survey of our members to explore how robust this insight was and what CIH Cymru should do to support succession planning in the sector – in terms of staff rather than board members.
We received responses from 83 housing professionals.
Just over half of respondents were from housing associations with a third from local authorities. The rest were from private developers, the private rented sector and letting agents.
A fifth (20 per cent) of respondents were in senior management roles (8 per cent CEOs), just over a quarter (26 per cent) were in housing manager roles, 30 per cent were at housing officer level and the rest from varying roles.
More than two-thirds (70 per cent) told us that their organisation had no succession plan in place whilst 11 per cent didn’t know whether they had one or not.
In terms of recruitment into their organisations over the past two years, two-thirds told us that they had recruited from within the sector.
In terms of other recruitment sources,
- Only 11 per cent recruited from local schools
- 20 per cent from colleges
- 36 per cent from universities
- 25 per cent through modern apprenticeships
These results were mirrored when we asked about the barriers to recruitment with almost three-quarters agreeing that housing is not promoted sufficiently as a career in schools:
Almost two-thirds (61 per cent) agreed that another key issue is that housing was not recognised as a profession in its own right.
When asked whether their organisation works with the following establishments to encourage housing as a career:
- Only 19 per cent said they worked with schools
- 33 per cent with colleges
- 28 per cent with universities
- 24 per cent with skills agencies.
The survey also asked whether respondents’ organisations undertake any of the following activities to nurture talent and promote succession planning:
- 48 per cent said they did sector-specific and competency-based training
- 19 per cent – secondment opportunities from outwith the sector
- 25 per cent – working with housing sector intermediaries and membership bodies to address common challenges
- 31 per cent – partnership working with local schools and colleges
- 27 per cent – recruiting from their tenant base.
The final question asked whether respondents would recommend the activities outlined in the list immediately above to address the issue of succession planning. Over half responded said they would on all those activities apart from recruiting from the tenant base, where only 36 per cent answered in the affirmative.
It is important to caveat the data collected by pointing out that this was a small sample (just over 10 per cent of the CIH membership in Wales) and the job roles represented in the survey may suggest that part of the issue could be more around perception and perhaps a lack of knowledge of work going on at a more senior level from the perspective of more junior frontline staff.
We do not assert that it’s an academically robust dataset but more of a quick snapshot at a specific point of time. That said, I am sure you will agree that it throws up some interesting data that tells CIH Cymru, as the organisation that represents housing professionals in Wales, that it has more work to do in terms of supporting you, housing professionals, in re-embedding that professional DNA into the sector and in turn addressing some of the recruitment and retention issues that we currently face.
Matt Dicks is director of CIH Cymru