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The purpose of this paper is to understand the post-COVID-19 fluctuations in the building construction demand from various angles at the national, regional, and sectoral levels. Despite the significant impact of COVID-19 on the building construction industry, a detailed quantitative analysis of the COVID-19 impact on the building construction demand is still lacking. The current study aims to (1) establish a statistical approach to quantify the COVID-19 impact on the building construction demand; (2) investigate the post-COVID-19 fluctuations in the construction demand of different building services, regional markets, and building sectors using the historical time series of the architecture billings index (ABI); and (3) identify vulnerable market and sector and discuss the post-COVID-19 recovery strategies.

The research methodology follows four steps: (1) collecting national, regional, and sectoral ABIs; (2) creating seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average models; (3) illustrating cumulative sum control charts to identify significant ABI deviations; and (4) quantifying the post-COVID-19 ABI fluctuations.

The results show that all the ABIs experienced a statistically significant decrease after COVID-19. The project inquiries index reduced more but recovered faster than billings and design contracts indices. The midwest billings index decreased the most among the regional ABIs and the commercial/industrial billing index dropped the most among the sectoral ABIs.

This study is unique in the way that it utilized the ABI data and the approach using SARIMA models and CUSUM control charts to assess the post-COVID-19 building construction demand represented by ABI fluctuations.

The paper aims at assessing the role of the different stages of the employment process in gauging workers' willingness to upskill themselves at the end of a seasonal employment contract by investing in further training.

The paper analyses data from a dedicated survey administered to a sample of seasonal employees. Through a regression analysis it explores the different stages of the employment process (job search, selection on the job activities), making a distinction between monetary and nonmonetary components of the investment in training.

Results show that all stages matter, but they do not have the same importance. Ex-ante motivations and work experience, notably the level of perceived workload and organizational commitment, are the main factors affecting workers' willingness to acquire industry-specific skills through training.

So far, the literature has extensively dealt with the poor levels of training in seasonal employers, but it did not analyse worker’s willingness to invest in training over the different stages of the worker experience. This paper fills this gap by separately testing the relative importance of such stages and identifying the most important phases of the employment process.