Alt.Form’s Tony Phillips Reframes the Conventional vs Modular Debate for Australian Builders
Alt.Form's Executive General Manager, Tony Phillips, penned a topical piece unpacking the trades shortage crippling conventional construction - and why the industry's usual playbook won't fix it. Here's what he had to say.
The Problem Isn’t Going Away
I talk to developers and builders constantly. And the conversation is always, in some form, the same. I can't get the trades. And when I do, the timeline blows out anyway.
That's not a complaint. That's a structural reality. And the data behind it is pretty confronting. Right now, the fill-rate for Technicians and Trades Workers across Australia sits at just 54%. Nearly half of every advertised trades role in this country goes unfilled. Infrastructure Australia tells us the industry is already short 141,000 workers just to deliver the public infrastructure pipeline - and that number is on track to hit more than 300,000 by mid-2027, as housing targets, renewables and major infrastructure all compete for the same shrinking pool of people. The pipeline feeding that pool? It's contracting, not growing. Trade apprenticeship commencements dropped 7% between 2024 and 2025. Master Builders reported a 22% reduction in new construction apprentice commencements in the year to December 2023. Of those who do start an apprenticeship, only around 58% finish within six years.
And you can see it in the build times - not because builders have gotten lazy, but because the sequenced trade model that conventional construction runs on is increasingly fragile in a market where the people to run that sequence are disappearing.
This isn't cyclical. The workforce is ageing. The apprenticeship pipeline is contracting. No wage increase is going to conjure the required tradespeople into existence within the timeframe that matters.
So the question isn't whether the problem is real. It is. The question is: which construction method is actually designed around it?
