Who’s working in infrastructure? A baseline report

This research provides the first comprehensive baseline analysis of New Zealand’s infrastructure workforce. It looks at how many people work in the infrastructure sector and what sort of work they’re doing. The research also investigates who is working in infrastructure, looking at factors like age, ethnicity, gender, training, and migration. The findings shed light on who is working in infrastructure and the pathways that they follow into the workforce.

This research will help us identify where New Zealand will face capacity pressures and how we can respond to them by sequencing work better and training and recruiting new workers. It also highlights increasing gender and ethnic diversity as a key opportunity for lifting our capacity to build infrastructure.

Key findings

• In 2018, the infrastructure workforce included an estimated 108,000 full-time equivalent workers. This is around 4.7% of the overall New Zealand workforce. These workers are split evenly between ‘horizontal’ infrastructure like roads, water pipes, and electricity transmission, and ‘vertical’ infrastructure like schools and hospitals.
• Constructing new projects accounts for less than half of the workforce. We estimate that around 14% of infrastructure workers are engaged in planning and design, 46% are constructing new assets, and a further 40% of infrastructure workers are engaged in asset management and maintenance.
• Mobility from other sectors is more important for ‘blue collar’ roles and migration is more important for ‘white collar’ roles. Professional and technical occupations include a higher share of migrants. These occupations are more likely to have university qualifications. Machinery operators and drivers and labourers are less likely to be migrants, and more likely to have moved between industries in recent years.
• The infrastructure workforce is ethnically diverse, but women make up a small share of the workforce. The overall infrastructure workforce has a similar ethnic makeup to the New Zealand population, but ethnic mix is uneven across occupational categories. Only 11% of infrastructure workers are women. Female participation is only marginally higher among younger age cohorts, meaning that this pattern is unlikely to change as the workforce ages.