Imagine you set a growth target: hire 100 skilled workers this year to expand capacity and go after bigger contracts.
You budget for it. You brief your HR team. You spend months recruiting.
Now imagine that by the time you have hired your hundredth person, 20 of your existing team have already walked out the door — joining a rival contractor, relocating to the Gulf, or simply leaving the industry. Your net headcount gain? Eighty people, not a hundred.
Now imagine your attrition rate is not 20% but 35%. To net 100 new hires, you actually needed to recruit 154 people.
You have burned through a significantly larger recruitment budget, strained your HR capacity, and disrupted project continuity — all to end up roughly where the data said you would be growing.
This is the treadmill effect. And according to the 2026 Construction Workforce Benchmark Report, published by workforce planning platform Bridgit and drawing on data from 233 companies and 114,000 professionals globally, it is one of the most significant and least discussed constraints on contractor growth today.
| “A contractor targeting 100 net new hires at 20% attrition actually needs to recruit 125. At 35% attrition, that number jumps to 154.” |
The Global Benchmark — and What It Means for Africa
The Bridgit report is primarily a North American dataset, covering nearly 40% of the Engineering News-Record’s ENR 400, the ranking of the world’s largest contractors.
The precise attrition figures — a median rate just below 20% in 2025, with some contractors significantly higher — reflect conditions in that market.
But the underlying dynamic is not unique to North America. In many respects, the treadmill effect may be more severe across African markets, for reasons that are structural, not incidental.
Africa’s construction workforce faces a compounding set of pressures. Intra-continental migration flows constantly redistribute skilled workers toward regional economic hubs.
South Africa, Nigeria, and Cote d’Ivoire attract talent from across the continent, but those same countries also lose their most experienced professionals to the Gulf states, the UK, Australia, and Canada.
According to the African Union development agency AUDA-NEPAD, approximately 70,000 skilled professionals leave Africa each year in search of better opportunities abroad.
Construction and built environment professionals — engineers, quantity surveyors, project managers, site superintendents — are among those most actively targeted by international recruiters.
| The Maths of the Treadmill Effect
If your growth target requires 100 net new hires, here is how many people you actually need to recruit at different attrition rates: |
| Scenario | Actual hires needed |
| 10% attrition rate | 111 people |
| 20% attrition rate | 125 people |
| 30% attrition rate | 143 people |
| 35% attrition rate | 154 people |
| 40% attrition rate | 167 people |
Most African contractors are not running these numbers. Their growth targets are set against gross headcount targets, without factoring in the pipeline loss that attrition creates. The result is that ambitious expansion plans consistently underdeliver — not because the work isn’t there, but because the workforce calculation was wrong from the start.
A Skills Problem, Not Just a Numbers Problem
The Bridgit report makes an important distinction that is especially relevant to African contractors: the labour shortage in construction is not primarily a headcount problem. It is an experience problem.
According to the data, 100% of construction leaders surveyed agreed that a project team’s collective experience plays a significant role in creating positive project outcomes.
The challenge is not simply filling seats — it is ensuring that the people in those seats have the depth of experience to deliver complex, high-value work.
This matters enormously in an African context, where the pipeline of mid-career and senior construction professionals is under sustained pressure.
The most experienced site superintendents and project managers are also the most mobile: senior professionals with strong track records are precisely the people being recruited away to the Gulf, to multinational contractor operations elsewhere on the continent, or to desk-based consultancy roles that offer better pay and fewer site risks.
| “60% of employers in sub-Saharan Africa identify skills shortages as a leading constraint on business operations.” — World Economic Forum |
The WEF’s Future of Jobs 2025 Report found that 60% of employers in sub-Saharan Africa identify skills shortages as a leading constraint.
In construction specifically, the problem is concentrated at the experienced end of the workforce — the people you need to lead projects, mentor juniors, and maintain continuity across complex builds.
What this means in practice: when an experienced superintendent or project manager leaves, the loss is not simply one person.
It is the institutional knowledge, the client relationships, the site management expertise, and often a degree of mentoring capacity that was quietly developing the juniors around them.
Replacing that with a new hire — who may require 12 to 18 months to reach full productivity — does not show up in a simple headcount calculation.
Why the Treadmill Spins Faster in Africa
Several factors specific to the African construction environment amplify the treadmill effect beyond what the global benchmark data shows.
Project-to-project contracting: Unlike large integrated contractors in North America or Europe who retain workers between projects, many African contractors — particularly mid-tier firms — run largely project-based employment models.
Workers move between contractors as projects end, creating a structural churn that would appear as attrition in any workforce tracking system.
Regional migration: Intra-African labour mobility is significant. Roughly 80% of intra-African migration has a strong labour component, according to the London School of Economics Africa at LSE research platform, and construction, mining, and infrastructure are among the most active sectors.
Workers follow infrastructure investment — a boom in East African rail projects draws workers from across the region; a slowdown in one market can trigger rapid outflows.
International recruitment pressure: The post-pandemic tightening of construction labour markets in the UK, Gulf, and Australia has intensified active recruitment from African markets.
South African civil engineers, Kenyan quantity surveyors, Nigerian project managers — all are actively targeted. The construction skills exodus is not a future risk. It is an ongoing operational reality.
Safety and site conditions: South African construction research has noted that concerns about site safety — including the widely reported phenomenon of construction mafias extorting contractors, particularly in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng — contribute to experienced professionals choosing less exposed roles or leaving the site environment entirely.
| The Compounding Effect
When a senior site superintendent leaves an African contractor, the organisation does not just lose one person. It loses: project continuity on active sites; mentoring capacity for junior staff; embedded client relationships; institutional knowledge of local sub-contractors and site conditions; and a portion of its bid credibility for complex projects requiring demonstrated experience. None of this appears in a standard attrition rate calculation. |
What Top Contractors Do Differently
The Bridgit benchmark data offers a clear finding about how leading contractors separate themselves from the pack — and it is not that they have lower attrition.
The data shows that the top 50 companies in the ENR 400 face broadly similar attrition rates to the rest of the industry. The difference is that their median growth rate is three times higher.
The separation comes from proactive workforce planning, not from solving the attrition problem. Top contractors plan further ahead — an average of 6.8 years versus an industry average of 4.7 years — and they build hiring pipelines that account for attrition rather than ignoring it.
For African contractors, several principles from the benchmark data translate directly:
- Plan for gross hires, not net hires. If your growth strategy requires 50 new people on the books by year-end, and your attrition rate is 25%, your recruitment target is actually 67 people. Build that into budget, timeline, and HR capacity from the start.
- Track attrition by role and seniority. The benchmark data shows that senior superintendents and senior project managers have attrition rates of around 4%, compared to 14-15% for their less-senior counterparts. The risk is concentrated in mid-career staff, not senior leaders. Knowing where your attrition is heaviest allows you to focus retention investment where it matters most.
- Hire earlier, develop deliberately. Because senior-level talent rarely moves, the most effective strategy is to hire at the mid-career or junior-professional stage and invest in developing those people to senior level. This is also more cost-effective in African markets, where the salary premium for imported senior talent — from the diaspora or from other markets — is substantial.
- Use assignment decisions as a retention tool. The Bridgit data highlights commute distance as one of the most significant and overlooked drivers of superintendent attrition. In an African context, this extends to broader assignment planning: workers assigned to remote or high-hardship sites without adequate rotation, support, or compensation are systematically more likely to leave. Workforce planning that accounts for assignment burden is a retention strategy.
- Track your rookie ratio. The benchmark introduces the concept of the rookie ratio — the proportion of team members with less than one year of company tenure. The industry average across all companies is 36.4%. Strategic contractors set targets for this number: high enough to develop new talent, low enough to maintain the experience base needed to deliver successfully. For African contractors building capacity on complex infrastructure or industrial projects, managing this ratio is a direct risk-management tool.
The Infrastructure Opportunity — and the Workforce Gap Behind It
The backdrop to all of this is significant. Africa’s construction pipeline is expanding. Infrastructure commands the fastest growth category within the African construction market, driven by transport, energy, and water projects.
The Kenya-Uganda-Rwanda Northern Corridor has seen over USD 15 billion in investment since 2024. South Africa has a stated USD 54 billion infrastructure plan.
Ethiopia’s Bishoftu Airport, Morocco’s rail network, Egypt’s New Administrative Capital — the megaproject pipeline is real and growing.
Industrial and manufacturing construction is also accelerating globally. The 2026 benchmark data shows industrial and manufacturing as the single highest-growth project type, up 68% year-on-year in 2025.
Across Africa, AfCFTA implementation is triggering parallel investments in industrial estates, logistics hubs, and manufacturing facilities that are beginning to show up in contractor order books.
The opportunity is substantial. But every contractor who has been in this industry long enough knows the pattern: a major contract is won, mobilisation begins, and then the scramble starts — to find experienced supers, to staff up project management, to onboard new workers fast enough to maintain programme. That scramble is the treadmill effect in action.
The contractors who will be best positioned to capture the infrastructure and industrial wave are not necessarily those with the strongest bid pipelines.
They are the ones who have already built the workforce depth to deliver — who have been hiring ahead of demand, retaining their mid-career talent, and planning two to three years beyond their current workload.
| “The contractors pulling ahead are not operating on better instincts. They are operating on better data.” |
A Note on Data and Local Applicability
The statistics cited from the Bridgit benchmark reflect global — largely North American — contractor data.
African-specific workforce attrition figures at the industry level are not comprehensively tracked or publicly available.
CCE News would encourage industry bodies including CESA, SAFCEC, and the Kenya National Construction Authority to prioritise the development of comparable African workforce benchmarks.
In the absence of local data, the global benchmark provides a useful reference point — and the principles it surfaces around proactive planning, experience management, and attrition-adjusted hiring targets are directly applicable to any contractor operating in a competitive market for skilled construction professionals.
The treadmill is not a North American problem. It is a construction industry problem. And in Africa, where the workforce pressures are in many respects more acute, understanding it may be one of the highest-value strategic insights available to a contractor right now.
Also Read
The Hidden Fuel Shock Reshaping US Construction Costs in 2026
Kenya Fuel Prices Surge as EPRA Announces Sharpest Hike in Years — Diesel Jumps 24% in One Month
