Utility Week

26 | DECEMBER 2022 | UTILITY WEEK Water Download report Building the skills pipeline A new Utility Week report – in association with Radius Systems – investigates how the water sector should be tackling the skills shortage by giving staff the expertise to work at peak effi ciency. A geing infrastructure is a major con- cern for water utilities. They operate and maintain critical assets that must be sustainable, resilient and future proof. They have to address issues such as leakage and water scarcity in a changing climate and under the media and consumer spotlight. But the infrastructure sector is expected to face a de• cit of a quarter of a million skilled workers before long. Network infrastructure such as a pipeline has a limited operational life. Water compa- nies must ensure they have the expertise in place to replace or rehabilitate it, and e• - cient delivery of these complex projects is under challenge. With constraints on fund- ing and personnel, they must get it right • rst•time. How is the sector tackling the shortage of skilled workers? Businesses can work stra- tegically and plan for the coming years, but can they do it alone? What support does the industry need from government, the regula- tor or other bodies? Utility Week, in association with manufac- turer Radius Systems, explored these issues with water companies, a major contractor and the industry's skills body and looked at the day-to-day operational issues that sta„ have to manage. Why the clock is ticking for the skills challenge The water industry is already looking ahead • ve and 10 years to meet its need for skilled workers, but Scott Aitken, managing direc- tor at Binnies, stresses that the problem is already here. Recruitment and training is already a signi• cant cost and meeting future requirements will test the industry. It is not enough to think about recruitment: the industry also has to be an attractive place to•work. When discussing the challenge of meet- ing skills needs, Severn Trent's director of human resources, Neil Morrison, de• nes other timeframes for the industry to con- sider. He talks about "time to competency" – the amount of time it takes to achieve tar- get performance level. He says: "If I need to increase the number of leakage technicians I have, and if the 'time to competency' is two years, I need to be bringing them into the organisation so I have that constant ' ow of people coming through." But that is just one component that goes into a much more comprehensive strategy. Morrison says: "If you are on the back foot and you are going out to the market and the market is competitive, then you are always going to struggle." Severn Trent recruited around 100 apprentices last year – up 10% on the pre- vious year – and that is expanding: "We invested £10 million in the last couple of years in our training academy exactly so we could upscale these sort of apprentice- ship programmes," Morrison says. But the academy is also used to reskill people inter- nally: "If you have an area where you know there will be growth, for example things like digital skills, we can use it to retrain peo- ple internally, using apprenticeships and the apprenticeship levy." That might use the two-year apprenticeship structure or a shorter training period. Aitken says: "We have been a lot more strategic on how we hire graduates into our business. Pretty much every year we recruit approximately 10% of our entire work- force as new graduates." That requires both investment and relationships with the right universities. The company recruits in 12 dis- ciplines that all lead to a professional quali- • cation, which means "this just isn't for two or three years. With our graduates, it is four or • ve years". Does the sector attract recruits? Binnies' Aitken says being an attractive des- tination is as important as recruitment and he talks about social value recruitment, look- ing outside traditional sources. SES Water's head of group HR, Sarah Brown, agrees, and says small companies have to be inventive: "Being a small company, you don't always have an opportunity to be promoted up", but personal and career development may include "being on an [industry] committee or working on a project or getting a second- ment, shadowing other people – there are lots of opportunities." The rise in interest in sustainability and green jobs has proved to be valuable both in making the industry more attractive and maintaining sta„ interest over time. Aitken also highlights options to give sta„ new career paths or entry into the industry. "That is one big area the industry needs to learn from and that includes things like project manager apprenticeships," he says. "The industry thinks apprenticeships are about leaving school at 16 or 18 and that is absolutely not the case – they are just as rel- evant for existing sta„ or mature sta„ . For our project manager apprenticeships, we are able to combine our own project man- ager training courses with project manager apprenticeships." The variety of roles in the water sector is increasing as it, like other sectors, starts to digitalise. That broadens the recruitment pool, but it will not replace traditional skills, says Severn Trent's Morrison: "The vast majority of our hiring and our skills remains in our core functionality. It is engineering skills, customer operations, leakage techni- cians, and customer contact. So it is looking at opportunities to bring di„ erent people into those areas rather than completely dif- ferent skill sets." Even with digitalisation, he says: "You don't want to deskill people by assuming that everything can be delivered by an algo- rithm. It becomes more about how you can better inform the • eld workforce, so they are more e„ ective in their work." For example, "using video, you can do an assessment and

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