Infrastructure skills training in the Highlands has never been more urgent. The region is on the edge of one of the biggest buildouts this country has ever seen – over 250 projects, more than £100 billion of investment, and at peak a projected need for 16,000 additional construction workers. The problem, as Callum McIntosh puts it plainly, is that those workers do not exist yet.
Callum is the owner of Highland Hammer Premier, a former president of the Scottish Plant Owners Association, and one of three Highland businessmen behind Hi Skills – a community interest company working to turn a derelict, fly-tipped quarry on the edge of Inverness into a national centre for infrastructure skills training in the Highlands and beyond.
In this episode of the Growth for Good podcast, Callum walks through how he got here – starting out in construction at 15, spotting the gap in specialist plant training when there was nowhere in Scotland to do an apprenticeship, and eventually co-founding Hi Skills with Jack Cole and Dylan Spink after dusting off a pre-Covid plan and scaling it up significantly.
Infrastructure skills training in the Highlands: what this episode covers
The conversation covers the full picture: the scale of the infrastructure pipeline coming to the Highlands, why Hi Skills chose the community interest company structure over a commercial venture, the case for Torvean Quarry in Inverness as the site, and the obstacles still standing in the way. Callum is direct about where he thinks the public sector is falling short, and clear about what needs to happen in the next 12 months for this to get moving.
What struck me most about this conversation is that Callum is not waiting for a strategy or a working group. He has identified the problem, found the site, built the structure, and is navigating the process to get it done. That is what community-led economic development looks like when it is real.
About Callum McIntosh and Hi Skills CIC
Callum McIntosh is the owner of Highland Hammer Premier and a former president of the Scottish Plant Owners Association. He co-founded Hi Skills CIC with Jack Cole and Dylan Spink. Hi Skills is a community interest company based in Inverness, working to establish a dedicated national centre for infrastructure skills training in the Highlands. Find out more at hi-skills.org.
About the Growth for Good Podcast
Growth for Good is a podcast about building businesses and communities in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Each episode features a founder, leader or community builder who is doing the work on the ground. Hosted by Drew Hendry, strategic advisor, former MP and director of teclan, the podcast explores what sustainable, community-rooted growth actually looks like in a place like the Highlands. New episodes are published regularly. You can find the full archive at drewhendry.scot/podcast.