GTR drives diversity agenda
Infamously one of the most male-dominated and least diverse industries, the rail industry is striving to attract a new generation of recruits. PAUL CLIFTON meets some of them
Govia Thameslink Railway needs 160 trainee drivers. It offers a year-long programme, with a training salary starting at £ 31,000. It is open to anyone over the age of 21.
23,000 people have applied.
The company has set out to improve diversity among drivers. 3,500 of the applicants were women, up from 800 a year before. And 7,500 were from BAME backgrounds.
But the company is clear that ‘diversity’ means more than skin tone or gender.
“It’s about diversity of thinking,” explains Zoey Hudson, head of talent, diversity and inclusion at GTR.
“It’s about not recruiting in your own image, but recruiting someone who might think differently, who might challenge. It’s about reflecting the communities we serve across GTR, which are probably the most diverse in the country.
“Having more diverse people in an organisation brings more variety of thought, personality and preferences. You don’t just want an organisation full of clones. All the service-profit models will tell you that when people can be themselves at work, they are more engaged. More motivated. And that relates to a more productive, more healthy business.”
The pandemic has brought a flood of applications from the aviation sector. Southern, Thameslink and Gatwick Express all serve the country’s second busiest airport.
During the pandemic, airlines and Gatwick Airport itself have shed thousands of highly qualified, safety-critical and customer-focused staff.
Similarly, in the retail sector shops have closed and tens of thousands of customer service people have lost their jobs.
This is now a buyer’s market - and the railway has the pick of the best people, helped by what is seen as generous pay, job security, and the potential for career progression compared with other walks of life.
No matter that passenger numbers have fallen to fewer than one in five of the preCOVID era. The National Skills Academy for Rail points to a looming employment shortfall.
Rail has an ageing workforce. In parts of the industry, up to half of employees become eligible for retirement in the next decade. NSAR Chief Executive Neil Robertson says 20,000 recruits will be needed in 2022, doubling to 40,000 in 2025.
The rail industry is infamously ‘pale, male and stale’. It has one of the lowest female-male gender ratios of any sector, and employees are less diverse than the passengers they carry.
As RAIL has previously reported, diversity reduces across the network the further away from London and other major cities. Partly that is a reflection of the areas from which people are recruited, and partly because employee retention and stability is higher further from the capital.
“We have a long way to go,” concedes Hudson.
“We have set challenging targets for this year. Fifty per cent of all new recruits to be female, apart from engineering, and 30% BAME. Engineering is a more difficult area to recruit women and ethnic minorities.
“We are talking about front line, entry-level recruits. But we recognise that the ethnicity and gender split gets lower, the higher up the organisation you go. It gets more white and more male as you reach senior manager level. That is a change we have yet to make.
“We have to offer career and talent opportunities internally as well, not just in recruitment. If you see people at senior level who look like you, then you feel you can progress as well.
“I’m an example of that. I worked my way up from customer service level to senior manager. This is such a varied industry - we need people to believe their career can go in any direction.”
With so many applications to the plum role of driver, sifting through them is not easy.
Applicants start with a series of online tests. The first round of interviews is now being conducted remotely, to comply with COVID restrictions. Trainees are enrolled on the new yearlong national Train Driver Level 3 apprenticeship programme.
A large proportion of drivers are still promoted from within the industry - people moving from guard or other customer service roles. But an increasing number come from outside. Hudson says her concept of diversity encompasses variety of thought and experience, so air crew hit by the collapse of international travel in the past year are especially appealing.
“The great thing about airline employees is that we know they have customer service aptitude. The rail industry is really trying to transform its customer service. Having people with a flying background adds to the talent we already have. We’ve taken on quite a lot of people from Thomas Cook.
“Retail has been hard hit, and we’ve seen an increase from there. It’s quite common for us to take people from the emergency services. And we want to tap into the armed forces more.”
What that doesn’t do is address the age problem. Many people come into the railway in their 30s or 40s as a second career, meaning that the staff age profile is not being significantly reduced.
Meet the recruits
RAIL spoke to one of the industry’s oldest apprentices, a South Western Railway trainee, and three recently qualified drivers who have been through GTR’s training programme. Their routes into their current roles are very different…
Randa Majid Mohammad had a previous career as airline cabin crew.
At 44, she was the oldest trainee in her group, and has been driving solo for only two months.
“I qualified just before Christmas, so this is still all quite new to me. Before that I was cabin crew for 14 years - half with BMI and half on British Airways short haul. Before that I had studied electrical engineering. But then I wanted to go travelling, and everything changed!
“It’s a massive change. But it’s still safetycritical, so I am used to following the procedures. And it’s customer service-based. A lot of cabin crew tend to go towards the railways when they want to stop flying.
“On my course there were three women and five men. I was the only non-English person - my family are from Iraq, but I grew up in Sweden. I’m used to being with different kinds of people, and the company is very hot on any kind of discrimination.
“My other half is a driver on GTR as well. My baby was only four months old when I started training. That was new territory for my trainers and my line manager. But they were very supportive, and they tried to find solutions if I needed anything.
“Now my partner and I both work shifts, but we have fixed days off, and it works OK for us. The money is good: £ 31,000 to start with, rising to £ 40,000 partway through training.
“I would say part-time or job-share would be helpful in the future.”
Rachel Fox represents a different approach to diversity of employment. She has just started work for South Western Railway as a duty control manager at the Wessex Integrated Control Centre in Basingstoke. It’s her first job in the industry, and she’s just completing her training before going solo.
“It’s like juggling lots of balls with your eyes closed. Or making a jigsaw when you can’t see the picture and someone else is moving the pieces around at the same time.
“I am still learning. I am very new at this! I’m in transition from shadowing to doing the role on my own. That’s up for discussion with my manager.
“The role is looking at the whole operation holistically. The Wessex Region is split into three areas: inner, outer and the Windsor lines. Each has a train service manager. I look over all of that, in a tactical role, working alongside Network Rail.
“I previously worked at British Airways for 23 years. I was furloughed for quite a bit of last year, which gave me time to think about the future. I could see that redundancy was looming, given the nature of what has happened in aviation. It’s an insecure business right now. I have 12-year-old twins, a husband, a mortgage and bills to pay.
“It was time to grab hold of the situation. I saw this role advertised, and my skills are transferable. There are a lot of similarities with my job in the airport centre at Heathrow, looking at all the flights in and out. We had stand planners, who would work out which planes parked at which stands with all the resources they need.
“In aviation you fly from A to B. The train service has lots of places in between, different lines branching off, and other services crisscrossing your path. And there are incidents along the way. So you might have to terminate a train or make alterations. There’s a lot more to it. It’s more dynamic than the aviation equivalent, because things change during the journey.
“It’s about understanding the whole network, and what fits where. There is so much technical stuff to grasp - way more than I thought. Lots of physics. I keep having to ask people to translate problems into language that I can understand.
“I’m looking across the control room and there are at least five females in today. It’s not half-and-half, but they’re not all middle-aged white males in the way that perhaps it used to be.
“Maybe I’m part of that change. There are ex-signallers who are female, there are information support people here, and train service managers who are female.
“It takes a lot of attrition to make that change. The airline industry is seeing forced attrition at the moment and maybe over time it will change on the railway. But with my background I don’t see people by gender or age.”