Steve Ham: Retraining is vital to fill skills gap in energy sector

Published on 17/08/2012 00:00

ENERGY North’s recent Skills Survey estimates that the north of Scotland’s energy sector needs to find 900 skilled people within the next five years. When you see the numbers needed and the fact we need them now, the well-documented skills shortage becomes a terrifying reality.

To address this issue we must turn talk into reality. Much attention is focused on young people with organisations and government working to persuade teenagers to study science and technology and school leavers to choose further education or apprenticeships that are rooted in engineering. But while this is a vote winner for politicians, young, newly qualified engineers are not necessarily what the industry needs.

While it is important to encourage youngsters to consider the energy industry. Energy North would like the government to incentivise people in other, less buoyant sectors, to retrain.

At The Underwater Centre, for example, we often train ex-military personnel to be divers or remotely operated vehicle pilots for the energy industry and we’ve seen many from the construction industry retrain as divers and go on to build great new careers. Elsewhere, many fishermen are retraining for the oil services industry.

The UK’s manufacturing sector is in the doldrums and we would like to see more people encouraged to consider the energy industry as an attractive option. Military cutbacks have left thousands of skilled men and women without work – this year we have already welcomed a number of aeronautics engineers from the Royal Air Force who have joined the energy sector.

So, while it is important to encourage youngsters to become the future pioneers of the energy industry, there are many skilled people currently out of work who could plug the 900-person gap within the next few years. And these people can retrain with ease.

All we need is the government to jump on this bandwagon with some funding to establish retraining programmes and the weight of the media to let people know the range of opportunities available to them in the north of Scotland.

• Steve Ham is general manager of The Underwater Centre in Fort William and an Energy North board member