BUILDING AN ENGINEERING CONSTRUCTION WORKFORCE FOR NET ZERO

The Engineering Construction Industry Training Board (ECITB) is the employer-led skills, standards and qualiĤcations body with statutory responsibility for the skills development of the engineering construction workforce in Great Britain. A non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Education, the ECITB works with employers and government to attract, develop and qualify personnel across a wide range of craft, technical and managerial disciplines. Since 2020, the ECITB has invested £48 million on training within the engineering construction industry, including support for 3,716 new entrants.

The Energy Security Strategy reveals the sheer scale of skilled engineers and construction workers that will be needed to achieve new zero targets and guarantee domestic energy security.

The recently published British energy security strategy states that by end of the decade new British industries will support around 480,000 clean jobs.

This includes 90,000 jobs in oģshore wind by 2030, up to 40,000 direct and indirect supply chain jobs across Carbon Capture Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) and Hydrogen as part of the North Sea Transition Deal, and up to 10,000 jobs on each large-scale nuclear power plant during their peak construction phase.

To ensure the UK achieves net zero by 2050, infrastructure projects need to be delivered across the country on an immense scale, placing huge pressures on the engineering construction workforce. Growth in the renewables, hydrogen and CCUS sectors will run parallel to a gradual decline in demand for oil and gas. The nuclear sector faces considerable change too, with signiĤcant levels of decommissioning on the horizon as most existing reactors are due to end power generation by 2030. These decommissioning eģorts will take place alongside the ambition, announced by the government in April, to deliver up to eight reactors, with one being approved each year until 2030.

With the engineering construction industry already facing a labour shortage there is a real risk that the new jobs created from decarbonisation projects will not be Ĥlled. This would not only be a missed opportunity to level-up and create new jobs across the country but would also jeopardise the national target of net zero by 2050 (2045 in Scotland).

With a huge surge on the horizon for labour, it is vital that skills investment remains central to industry planning. Yet, with such a complex challenge, an array of complementary solutions must be deployed, as there is no silver bullet to address the labour and skills shortage.

Labour Market Intelligence will be crucial to forecast the skills requirements, as will strong coordination between industry and government to ensure that vital infrastructure and decarbonisation projects are prioritised and eģectively sequenced. Crossindustry collaboration will be required to produce implementation roadmaps that recognise how skilled labour will need to be shared across projects. Clear timeframes will help the workforce to quickly be deployed across projects, both reducing downtime and preventing bottlenecks or delays due to labour being tied up on other projects. Such coordination eģorts will be particularly important in the industrial clusters where we will see a lot of activity between now and 2050.

Spearheaded by BEIS and DfE, the recently established Green Jobs Delivery Group convenes leaders from business, industry, trade unions and academia to support the delivery of skilled green jobs. While still in its infancy, the group recognises the skills volume challenge and demonstrates a commitment to collaboratively address it.

To ease workforce transferability, measures to standardise competence assurance across industry should be agreed. The ECITB has supported the industry-led Connected Competence initiative, which has been adopted by the major oil and gas energy service companies covering 75% of the oģshore workforce. Expanding this approach will facilitate the movement of the workforce across key energy transition projects where their skills are in demand.

It is likely that some existing jobs could be displaced in the energy transition. Where this happens, reskilling will play an important role in ensuring the existing workforce can smoothly migrate to decarbonisation projects. Net zero also presents a major opportunity to attract the next generation of talent into engineering roles who increasingly want to pursue careers in greener sectors.

The energy transition provides industry with an unprecedented opportunity to reinvent itself and diversify its recruitment, but this challenge requires a concerted and coordinated eģort from industry, government and partners to overcome the most pressing skills crisis of our age.