Construction Education Alignment with Industry Skills Demands: A Data-Driven Evaluation Using Sampled Evidence in Australia

The Australian construction industry is currently navigating a productivity challenge in which workforce skills shortages represent a contributing factor. Historically, attempts to quantify this deficit have relied upon subjective surveys or ethically complex data collection methodologies, lacking the objective scale required for policy reform. To bridge this methodological gap and contribute to the literature with a current skills alignment analysis, this research introduces a natural language processing (utilising SBERT)-driven computational approach to explore the alignment between industry demand and educational supply. A sample of 3468 industry job advertisements from 2016 to 2018 and in 2026 were mapped against a weighted national educational supply vector (72.5% Vocational Education and Training, 27.5% Higher Education) using the standardised Australian Skills Classification taxonomy. The analysis indicates that curriculum–industry misalignment is a potential structural contributor to the skills gap in the sampled construction skills gap. Cosine similarity and Spearman’s rank analyses exposed a misalignment of skills priority by academia (ρtop20 = 0.32 and ρglobal = 0.43). While the education sector dedicates nearly 90% of its combined curriculum to specialist tasks skills, these skills showed a misalignment (60%) with rapidly shifting industry demands. Furthermore, while explicit demand for technology tools skills remained stagnant, a misalignment (54%) quantitatively reflects the documented industry concerns regarding digital readiness caused by a lag in digital-skills training. Ultimately, this study contributes a data-driven methodology and a current skills gap analysis that enables educational policymakers to conduct agile, computation-driven curriculum audits. This supports more frequent and evidence-informed curriculum review in response to the evolving Australian construction industry skill demands.