Strategies to recruit and retain professional quantity surveyors in the public sector construction organisations

Abstract

Construction industry has a direct link to the country’s economy and development. It is the Quantity Surveyor’s (QS) responsibility to ensure that the resources in the construction industry are utilised to the best advantage of the society by providing financial management for project and cost consultancy to the client during the whole construction process. Hence Quantity Surveying (QS) profession is significantly important for any building or civil engineering project. Due to the dynamic nature of the construction industry, an incessant battle has to be competed with the constraints of time, cost and quality. In this scenario, QS has the responsibility to utilise the monetary fund very efficiently and effectively to gain the optimum value for money without having the risk of losing control of money. Therefore, QSs are working as cost planners, cost controllers and cost managers. Their role and the practices are expanding day by day and the industry demands for QSs with variety of experience, distinctive competencies and skills. At present, a precarious shortage of QS professionals can be often evidenced in Sri Lankan construction industry. The tendency of having the aforementioned shortage is tremendously high in the public sector projects due to the extreme governmental influence. Moreover, the probability of government QS professionals leaving work places and join the public sector is highly increased in past few decades. Since QSs are one of the human resource inputs to the construction industry, it can be understood that employee turnover will barricade the sustainable construction practice in public sector by failing to preserve the human resource for the future. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the strategies to recruit and retain professional QSs in public sector organisations. The survey approach was used to investigate the research problem and questionnaires and semistructured interviews were used as the data collection techniques. Data was collected from two samples; QSs working in public sector and Human Resource Managers (HRM) in public sector construction organisations respectively. Binomial test, Relative Importance Index (RII) and few simple arithmetic formulas were used to analyse quantitative data and content analysis was used to analyse qualitative data. According to the research findings, QSs in public sector are reluctant to retain due to low salary packages, less opportunity to develop their career and insufficient work under their scope. According to the binomial test, the majority of QSs think that proper human resource management will be a good solution to overcome this shortage. According to the perspective of human resource managers, although they have realised the problem, they have to implement the plans and strategies according to the government rules and regulations. As the final outcome of the research, a framework was developed to recruit and retain more QSs in public sector construction organisations.