How is confidence in the civil construction market after the second quarter of 2023? Let’s take a look at our exclusive poll results which paint a different picture from the same poll we conducted after the first quarter of this year.
Hi, my name is Taylor Maurer. I am the Senior Managing Partner here at Heavy Civil Resource Consultants, a boutique executive search firm for the civil construction and engineering industries. Confidence in the civil Construction market soared after the second quarter of this year where the belief that we would see strong growth for the rest of 2023 rose 84.7% from 14 to 26%. The number of individuals who thought there would be moderate growth after Q1 remained the same after Q2 at 42%. Individuals believing that we would see the industry shrink fell 70% from 17% to 10% and was the largest shift category contributing to the optimism of strong growth, Only 22% of those polled after Q2 believed that the market would remain stagnant compared to 27% after Q1.
In Summary, the confidence in the market has seen a huge shift toward the positive. We believe that this massive increase that we will see continued strong growth for the rest of 2023 is attributed to more funds or the announcement of the allocation of funds from the Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act. That being said the industry is still facing some huge challenges that are keeping nearly one-third of construction professionals anticipating no growth or even predicting the market shrinking for the final two quarters of 2023. Here at the end of July, we saw a record-breaking labor shortage of 650,000 open positions in the construction market, Construction companies still struggle to fill large gaps in management shortages and the recent inflation and long-term effects of COVID have kept materials costs high.
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