Built from the inside
Built from the inside. Not the outside.
yfor wasn’t designed by people who studied construction from a distance. It was built by someone who lived inside it, and saw an industry struggling to attract, retain and develop its people in a highly regulated, ever-changing world.
yfor is a skills intelligence and competence assurance platform for construction.
Why yfor exists
30 years seeing the same gap, everywhere.
Geraldine Gordon has spent 30 years working in and around construction — as a director, as a board member, as someone who has run workforce programmes and watched what happens when the records don’t match the reality. She sits on the CITB Northern Ireland board. She is part of the CEF Skills Task Force. She is currently advising the Local Government Green Skills Task Force on how PAS 2035 and PAS 4014 will be operationalised at a local level.
Which means she is building the platform in line with how the requirements are written. That is not a coincidence. That is the point.
“The skills were there. The people want to deliver the standards. A practical system to do it was not.”
Every construction business Geraldine has worked with or advised has the same problem. Workforce capability is assumed, not evidenced. Succession decisions are made on memory. The apprenticeship system was built for the training provider — and the employer who funded it, employed the apprentice, and provided the supervisor has no visibility of their own investment.
Meanwhile, the Building Safety Act has put a legal obligation on the dutyholder to evidence individual competence. PAS 2035 has extended that obligation to retrofit. Licence to practise is emerging for multiple trades. The regulatory environment is moving faster than most employers realise. And not one of them has a system that can generate the evidence these frameworks require.
yfor is that system.
And it is being built by someone who is in the room where the requirements are being decided — which means it will meet the standard before the standard is finalised.
CEF Excellence in Technology Award
Won with CFM — yfor’s first pilot customer
CFM, an all-trade facility management contractor and member of the Construction Employer Federation, needed a single view of workforce competence across multiple trades, sites and training providers. Their existing systems — spreadsheets, provider portals, manual CSCS checks — couldn’t produce the evidence their clients and regulators were starting to require.
yfor was deployed as a live pilot, mapping CFM’s workforce across all six skill areas, connecting apprenticeship evidence from multiple e-portfolios, and generating competence records in real time. The Construction Employer Federation recognised the partnership with the CEF Excellence in Technology Award — the first time the award had been given for a workforce intelligence platform.
Board of Directors
Three people. 30 years of construction. Two decades of tech. The governance to scale.
yfor was built by people who know the problem from the inside — and have the technical and financial infrastructure to solve it at scale.
Geraldine Gordon
30 years in construction as a director, board member and skills programme lead. Currently advising on how PAS 2035 & PAS 4014 will be operationalised at a local government level.
- CITB Northern Ireland — Board Member
- CEF Skills Task Force
- Local Government Green Skills Task Force
Simon Hamilton
Started in construction — writing bids, running contracts — before 25 years founding and scaling technology businesses across infrastructure, SaaS, media and payments. Has led companies through VC raises, acquisitions and exits, and brings that full lifecycle to yfor’s board.
- Multiple technology businesses founded, scaled and exited
- Cloud-native platform architecture, payments infrastructure, AI deployment
- Technical due diligence and advisory
Ingrid Blake
Chartered Accountant who built the financial and governance infrastructure into yfor from day one. Data protection, business continuity, and operational transparency are structural, not afterthoughts.
- Chartered Accountant
- Governance from day one
- Financial stability and business continuity
What we believe
Four things we know to be true about construction.
Skills belong to the worker
Evidence of competence should not exist only on a CV. yfor gives workers portable, verifiable skills recognition that travels with them — which is also what makes your business more attractive to the people you want to hire, develop and retain.
Employers deserve to see their workforce
You cannot develop what you cannot see. Skills intelligence should be real-time, role-specific and actionable, not an annual spreadsheet exercise.
Compliance is the floor, not the ceiling
Meeting BSA, PAS 2035 and CSCS requirements is the baseline. yfor takes your workforce beyond compliance to real, evidenced capability.
Construction needs its own framework
Generic HR platforms do not understand construction. The roles, the regulations, the way careers develop — these needed a framework built from the ground up. That is the 1,000-role skills ontology.
The regulatory moment
The industry is moving toward evidenced competence. The question is whether employers will be ready.
The Building Safety Act, PAS 2035, CSCS, and emerging licence-to-practise frameworks are all converging on the same requirement: individual-level, evidenced competence. yfor generates that evidence automatically, as a by-product of how your workforce learns and works.
See the full regulatory alignment overview →
Want to understand how yfor works in your context?
Whether you are an employer, a regulatory contact, or an industry body — Geraldine is the right first conversation.