Jennifer Brennan

Jennifer Brennan is a founding Director of Harlow Consulting – a research and evaluation consultancy specialising in skills, education, labour market and qualifications across a wide range of industry sectors. Jennifer specialises in the construction and built environment sector, with a particular emphasis on skills, competencies and training/education provision. Her clients have included the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB), Homes Builders Federation, National Housing Federation, Off-site Homes Alliance, DLHUC, Historic England and the Scottish and Welsh Governments.

Jennifer’s experience of green skills dates back to 2012 when she led research into a Competency Framework for the Green Deal. She is an expert in skills analyses, with projects spanning identification of skills needs and creation of skills personas for the offsite construction sector, research for local authority areas forecasting demand and supply of skills needs, and on-going research into heritage construction skills gaps – with a particular focus on retrofit, and associated training, qualification, and apprenticeship requirements.

Other recent projects include research to inform the development of CITB’s net-zero forecasting model, with the purpose of predicting the skills and labour requirements needed across energy efficiency retrofit sector to achieve the Government’s net-zero targets; and a desk-based review to help improve Historic England’s understanding of the CO2e contribution of traditional and modern building materials in the context of retrofit.