Promoting Construction Worker Professionalization under Industry 4.0

Dear Colleagues,

As a traditional labor-intensive industry, construction is facing severe challenges from workforce aging, high turnover, labor shortages, and low skill level among construction workers. Particularly under the background of industry 4.0, the present workforce market cannot meet the needs of the future transformation development of the construction industry. In addition, due to poor working conditions, low salaries, and high occupational safety and health risks, most young employees are unwilling to join this industry, even though many have majored in building, civil and construction engineering. That means the workforce market will constrain the construction industry for a long time in the future.

Construction worker professionalization means that construction workers should transform from unskilled pure manual laborers into skilled industrial workers. It requires various amounts of effort, including improving the workforce quality, improving construction workers' work conditions, providing corresponding social security, etc. Promoting construction worker professionalization is expected to address the above-mentioned problems, thus promoting sustainable development of the construction industry.

This Special Issue of Buildings offers a platform for promoting construction worker professionalization under industry 4.0. We encourage researchers, practitioners, and scientists to submit original research articles, case studies, reviews, critical perspectives, and viewpoint articles on topics including, but not limited to:

• Advancements in construction worker professionalization;
• Critical factors of construction worker professionalization;
• Influence mechanisms of construction worker professionalization;
• Strategic analysis and planning of construction worker professionalization;
• Policy simulation of construction worker professionalization;
• Data-driven methods for promoting construction worker professionalization.

Prof. Dr. Hongyang Li
Dr. Beibei Zhang
Dr. Su Yang
Dr. Yingmiao Qian
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Buildings is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.