City Building

City Building is comprised of two organisations –

City Building is one of Scotland’s largest construction companies, providing a wide range of construction, maintenance, and manufacturing services. Along with design and build construction, repairs and maintenance, and major investment and refurbishment we also offer manufacturing, training, and specialist services, new house building, and retrofitting carbon reduction technologies.

City Building has more than 2,000 staff and is one of Scotland’s largest employers of apprentices with around 200 apprentices on its books.

City Building’s Manufacturing Division, Royal Strathclyde Blindcraft Industries (RSBi), is Europe’s largest supported business and one of the UK’s most successful social enterprises.

Based in a specially adapted factory in the Springburn area of Glasgow, more than half of RSBi’s 250 staff have a disability.

Our award winning training college is the most successful apprentice training college in Scotland. We are the industry’s largest employer of female craft trade apprentices and have one of the highest pass-out rates for apprentices at 94% compared to an industry average of 75%.

City Building recently celebrated being the first construction firm in Scotland, to achieve the Investor in Young People (IYP) Platinum accreditation.

The new Platinum award is the highest level that can be attained within the acclaimed (IYP) training and development framework. It was launched to encourage employers to prioritise areas including mental health, financial wellbeing, fair work practices and meta skills.

We also received The Queen’s Award for Enterprise 2021: Promoting Opportunity which celebrates outstanding achievements from organisations across the UK and is recognised as the most prestigious award any business can win. This is the third Queen’s Award for Enterprise we have won, having previously been granted the Sustainable Development Award in both 2018 and 2012. With the award, City Building has become just one of 18 companies to be recognised in 2021.

Our values are Excellence, Honesty, Ambition, Trust and Community and our mission is to contribute excellence in construction, repairs, maintenance, manufacturing and training to our customers, our employees, partners, suppliers and the local communities in which we work.

We employ one in eight construction workers in Glasgow and therefore compete to recruit the best. We recruit 60 craft apprentices annually and to build diversity we work through our “Construction for All” strategy, where we take a unique approach because we believe opportunities for training and an apprenticeship are life changing.

Alan Burns, LLM MBA FCIOB is the Executive Director of both organisations.