Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 20TH - 26TH SEPTEMBER 2019 | 25 Operations & Assets Analysis A mong myriad challenges for utilities, chief among them is concern about a rapidly approaching skills shortage. In its recent Workforce Renewal and Skills Strategy 2020 report, the Energy & Utilities Skills Partnership warned that 20 per cent of the sector's workforce will retire within ten years, which will require 221,000 recruits if they are to be replaced. Tony Cocker, chair of the partnership, lists the problems: "An ageing workforce, intense competition for many of our core skills, growing complexity within roles, a rapidly changing technology environment, a need for more diversity of skills and the peo- ple who perform them, rising labour costs, and ongoing difficulties in attracting suffi- cient new and young people." The partnership's report calls for "collec- tive action" and for the industry to face up to the skills challenge. Sharing Cocker's concern about an ageing workforce is Lila Thompson, chief executive of British Water, who says the water sector is about to lose expertise as people retire. The UK's water industry directly employs 127,000 and indirectly a further 86,200. Thompson says: "We've got an ageing work- force – one-fi"h is over 55. In the next ten years we are going to lose skills and expertise She says the industry is making efforts to address the problem, such as promoting engineering to children while they are still at primary school, but more needs to be done. "There needs to be a wider national cam- paign around water and how it's delivered and understanding the process," she says. The nuclear challenge Facing similar issues is the UK's nuclear industry. Nigel Hawkins, utilities analyst at Hardman and Co and a Utility Week cor- respondent, points out that the UK has not built a new reactor since Sizewell in 1995. He says those with top class nuclear skills in 1990, for example, would have been at least 30 years old and will likely have moved on or be considering retirement soon. "There is a whole generation of people who will have retired," he adds. And aside from an ageing workforce, the current political chaos is exacerbating prob- lems for everyone. Three years on and we still don't know how Brexit will pan out. Tom Greatrex, former Labour shadow energy minister and current chief executive of the Nuclear Indus- try Association, says the industry is shortly going to need a lot of skilled construc- tion people but no- one knows what the arrangements are going to be for recruiting them from Europe. "There are also nuclear-specific skills where overall we have an issue," he says. And the recruitment problems dogging the nuclear industry are shared by the wider energy sector. Earlier this year, a call was issued at the SNS2019 conference, organ- ised by the East of England Energy Group (EEEGR), for the industry to engage with its future workforce earlier. The EEEGR believes "urgent action is needed" across the energy industry to work with younger students to secure the skills it needs. It said that in offshore wind alone, the industry needs to treble its jobs total in the next decade. Industry trade body Renewable UK agrees, saying the country will need 27,000 highly skilled workers by 2030. Renewable UK's head of technical affairs, Rhys Jones, says the UK offshore wind indus- try is "prioritising investment in skills and training programmes" across the country, with a focus on coastal communities. He adds: "As part of the offshore wind sector deal, the industry has set up a new body this summer, the Investment in Talent group, led by Renewable UK's chief execu- tive Hugh McNeal. "This group is devising ways to ensure that we attract a wide and diverse range of entrants. Industry is working closely with colleges up and down the country to ensure courses are provided at every level, for our future wind turbine technicians, project managers and engineers. "This represents a multi-billion-pound economic opportunity for job creation embedded at the heart of the UK's coastal communities." If engagement is one remedy, another is career planning. Nick Ellins, chief executive at the Energy & Utilities Skills Partnership, cites the smart meter rollout as an exam- ple of what can go wrong without it. "If the pitch for smart metering is 'well, this project will last until 2020' – you've effectively told everybody who has got a job in it when their redundancy date is," he says. He says there should be more coherence in labour market planning. "If you are looking at UK infrastructure in a post-European environment, you would naturally look and say 'OK, so where have I got the talent? When do I need them? And if I don't need them till then, where can I deploy them in the mean- time so I don't lose them?' "There needs to be some thought leadership, a guiding mind that looks at the puzzle that is UK plc, priorities the sectors that need the peo- ple first, and then works out how to deploy them. There is no central government head to do that." Could the answer also lie in the demo- graphics of the workforce? British Water's Thompson says she and others are all too aware of the fact that the industry is male-dominated and believes more should be done to attract women and minorities, namely by challenging recruit- ment agencies to "deliver more diversity". She says: "People are conscious of the fact that the industry is male-dominated, so when there are opportunities for recruitment we need to make sure that recruitment agen- cies are offering a diverse range of candidates to recruit from. I think if they are not seeing that, then they should challenge recruitment agencies to deliver more diversity. "There has to be a desire at board level and management level to recruit diverse candidates or they will continue to recruit as they do now without being aware how much the sector is dominated by males." The skills gap is an age-old problem Take an ageing workforce in an engineering- led sector with an indifferent appeal to the young, add in Brexit, and you've got a recipe for a skills shortage. Adam John reports. "We've got an ageing workforce – one-fifth is over 55." LILA THOMPSON, CHIEF EXECUTIVE, BRITISH WATER

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