Peer review: Douglas McCormick
Chief Executive Officer, Sweett Group
As the country’s rail network gears up to deal with increasing demand, identifying what skills are required, how they can be taught and who can be trained is vitally important for an industry that is set to experience continued investment and expansion.
Major projects including Crossrail, the Northern Hub and the Edinburgh-Glasgow Improvement Programme, as well as the large-scale electrification of the network and improved connections to ports and airports across the country, will undoubtedly require many more skilled workers.
The UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES) recently published a report that highlights the mis-match between supply and demand when it comes to skills in the UK, claiming that “more of the existing workforce has gaps in the skills they need to be proficient in their jobs”. And it paints a damning picture of how this issue is being tackled, saying: “There is limited movement on measures of training and development activity, and indeed some signs of decline.”
This dearth of training must be addressed by the rail industry, with employers taking a lead on moving the country towards a demand-led education model, featuring improved communication between employers and education providers as to what skills we need ‘on the ground’.
We need to make use of our National Skills Academy for Rail Engineering (NSARE) as a vehicle to align multiple initiatives, to avoid reinventing the wheel, and to ensure a focused and co-ordinated approach to tackling the issue. There should be multiple pathways to training, with further education, higher education and apprenticeship providers all delivering credible, high-quality courses that suit the needs of learners and employers alike.
At Sweett Group, we have a quantity surveying apprenticeship programme that is designed to give young people an opportunity to learn on the job while working towards both an NVQ level 3 in Quantity Surveying and a BTEC in Construction and the Built Environment. Through our partnering with The Construction Industry Training Board and Havering College, we are able to offer a programme that features both practical and theoretical training, providing our apprentices with the skills they need to succeed in the industry. Modern apprenticeships are a fantastic way of providing our industry with highly capable workers - they also represent a great deal for learners, as they are able to earn while training.
Another important element to recognise in our education planning is that the skills we require are changing - software engineers are now as essential as civil engineers to the development and running of our infrastructure. We need to work with educators to encourage the teaching of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) skills, and develop ways in which the industry can demonstrate how these skills can be applied in practice, in order to encourage young people to consider a career in our industry.
As Neil’s open letter mentions, there are remarkably fewer rail-related degree courses available than those in the fields of aerospace and automotive engineering, and we should look to those fields to understand how we can catch up.
Furthermore, diversity is a key issue that employers in the rail industry need to tackle, as just 5% of the technical workforce is female. Employers should look to develop flexible working practices to attract a more diverse range of people to the industry. Schemes designed to help disadvantaged young people into work should be a target for the rail industry, as we cannot afford to see potential go to waste. I also greatly advocate employing people coming out of the armed forces - in my experience, ex-military personnel are highly-skilled individuals with excellent transferable skills.
Finally, within the working environment, we should continue to innovate to address issues of low productivity. The UKCES report identifies that “opportunity and performance are linked”, so therefore we should be pursuing a culture that nurtures and harnesses talent. Soft skills and transferable people skills should be considered just as valuable as technical skills, as it is clear that productivity and staff retention are heavily influenced by the environment people work in and the quality of the management that they receive.
Above all, we need to attract people with the potential that this industry needs and give them opportunities to grow and succeed, so we can take a big step back behind the yellow line.
