Andrew Esson, an experienced skills campaigner looks back at his experiences in the field.
40 years ago, as a second year engineering student at Aberdeen University, I was looking forward to a summer of vocational experience at Monktonhall Colliery outside Edinburgh.
Since then, I’ve had a career in high value manufacturing that has pretty much followed the development of the Energy Mix: coal extraction; nuclear; gas fired power stations; oil & gas exploration & production; electric vehicles and most recently recently offshore wind. I’ve won awards, picked up a few battle scars battle scars, travelled the world and generally had a fantastic career, and am now heading towards retirement.
I’ve been in the skills game well over 30 years (longer including my own graduate trainee experiences) And whereas the last 4 ½ years have been spent on the education side of skills, the previous 25 years plus were spent as a recruiter, employer, trainer & developer of graduates and apprentices. Indeed, as I near the end of my career in Engineering, I take great delight in charting the progress of my former graduates and apprentices as they carve out their careers around the world.
I have recently stepped down from my role as Energi Coast Skills group Chair, which at the last count, is the fourth skills group I have chaired. Previous groups being the EEF (noe Make UK) NE skills group in 2009, the Primary Engineer NE Steering Group in 2012, and the Subsea North East Sills & Resource Group in 2013.
So what have I learned from my passion and commitment to skills:
Firstly, not a lot has changed since my involvement with industrial skills in 1990. The issues we are dealing with: increasing apprentice numbers; recruiting graduates; improving diversity; improving leadership skills in business, are nothing new. As an example, in the 1990’s as a young manager at Weir Pumps in Glasgow, I was involved in initiatives to attract women into careers in science and engineering, something which very much remains on today’s agenda. Another example: the EEF NE Skills Group survey in 2010 across 80 businesses identified skills shortages at technician and graduate engineer levels.
Secondly, the endless procession of skills reviews commissioned by governments (does anyone remember the Leitch Report, published in 2006, or the Wolf Report published in 2011) are akin to never-ending re-arranging of the deckchairs around the same basic issues: not enough young people progressing into STEM careers, not enough employers recruiting apprentices, a shortage of Level 3 & 4 vocational skills in industry, and not enough diversity in the workforce.
Thirdly, the challenges we will be talking about today, are not exclusive to one particular sector. Pretty much as we speak, the same conversations are happening in our region, within the offshore wind sector, the automotive sector around batteries and vehicle electrification, in health sciences and pharmaceuticals, and in digital technologies.
So should we give up? Absolutely not! Why not, well if we in industry and education don’t care, no one else will.
What’s my advice, as a veteran skills campaigner? Well I can distil thirty years of skills work into two simple messages:
Firstly, businesses, don’t wait for someone else to sort your skills challenges, be pro-active and grow and develop your own talent. Any one of our region’s colleges, universities and training providers would love to help you with that.
Secondly, rather than treating skills as a competition between industry sectors, I would love to see industry sectors combine and coordinate a cohesive schools engagement programme to showcase the breadth of cross-sectoral STEM-based career opportunities in the region. This would be so much more effective, and less confusing, than a sector by sector approach to engagement with education.
