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CAREERTIP: Construction Professionals should start treating AI like a new colleague

Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t going away and construction professionals need to embrace it and start working with it as if it were a new colleague. Across all industries, including construction, the adoption of AI is rapidly gaining momentum. This is because technology has finally advanced to the point where it can handle the complex and unstructured data involved in construction projects. Experts predict that AI will continue to develop into what they call "composite AI." Construction professionals, however, have some concerns about adopting AI. These concerns include: Regulatory Framework: Construction professionals must ensure that they comply with all applicable laws and regulations. They must also protect themselves, as AI can be programmed with specific guidelines to produce desired outputs. Ethics : There are important legal and ethical issues to consider when using AI. For example, who is liable if something goes wrong? Who is responsible if a disaster occurs as

NEWS: World rankings of best and worst countries to be a construction worker

Clothing maker Workwear Guru has compiled a ranking of the best and worst countries in the world to be a construction worker, based on wages, cost of living and health and safety.


Switzerland has the best combination of these factors, based largely on its average salary of $80,000, the highest in the world. It is followed by the UK, where wages have been buoyed by a post-Brexit shortage of skilled labourers. Average salaries there have hit $58,000, according to the ranking, and it has an 8% accident rate, one of the lowest in the world.

The company calculated safety scores from polls conducted by Lloyd’s Register Foundation and average wages using Numbeo’s and worldpopulation’s Cost of Living index.

Belgium is in third place, followed by the massive markets of the US in fourth position and Canada in fifth, despite accident rates of 20% and 22% respectively. The American construction sector is expected to grow 3.1% in 2022 and trade bodies have predicted that 430,000 jobs will have to be created to meet demand.


The report also looked at which US states are best for workers. This turned out to be Illinois, based on the present Chicago building boom, followed by Georgia and Michigan.

After the micro-states of Luxembourg and Singapore, China is in eighth position – somewhat surprisingly given its low per capita GDP compared with the other countries in the top 10. However construction workers can expect to make $32,000, the cost of living is a little more than half of the US and the accident rate is 9%. Added to that, China’s domestic economy is expected to generate $2.1 trillion in building projects by 2030, ensuring there will be no shortage of employment.

On the other end of the table, the lowest average wage for a construction worker – $875 a month – is paid in Uzbekistan, making that country the least desirable place in the world to work, with the exception of Yemen.

The most dangerous places to be a construction worker are Myanmar and Uganda. A recent report carried out by Uganda’s National Building Review Board found that only 6% of sites examined were being supervised by professionally qualified staff (see further reading). Myanmar has the highest incident rate of 58%, more than 14 times higher than Poland, which has a rate of 4%.

The lowest cost of living is to be found in Pakistan and India.

More generally, the conditions of construction workers are set to improve across the world as capital investments that were put on hold during the Covid-19 lockdowns are returned to the drawing board and the demand for workers increases.


HAVE YOUR SAY: Where would you rank South Africa as a country for Construction workers, will you rank it amongst the best or worst and why?

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