Process Skills Academy advances business plan
12 Mar 2007
The NSAPI shadow board is steering this process, led by chairman Chris Horton of Linpac Plastics and with Paul Booth, president of SABIC UK, as deputy chair. An executive management group that interfaces between the shadow board and the project team is chaired by Tony Birch, former site director of BASF on Teesside and a member of the North East Process Industry Cluster’s (NEPIC) Leadership Team.
“As an employer-led organisation with a national remit, NSAPI will provide leadership and an injection of pace into the up-skilling of our existing workforce and ensure provision of specific training modules for our sector members based on the gold standard,” Birch told Process Engineering.
He says the academy must work to ensure the availability of new employees to meet individual expansion targets, particularly in the SME sector. “I expect nothing less than NSAPI becoming a key structure to help us all deliver the GDP growth that we have targeted and which the UK needs - that is why I agreed to become personally involved.”
The academy will focus particularly on employer-endorsed vocational learning with links into higher education and will consider the skills needs of both the existing and the future workforce. It will serve companies involved in chemical, pharmaceutical and polymer manufacture, which have a combined turnover of £67.1 billion.
There is a need for a skills academy in the process sector because of the retirement of many skilled workers and fewer new entrants coming through the graduate and apprenticeship routes, according to Craig Crowther, NSAPI’s newly appointed project director. At the same time, he adds, the boom in activity in the worldwide oil and gas sector has attracted skilled technicians to work offshore and, as a result, strained resources in other sectors, such as chemicals.
“The increased competition in all sectors from overseas producers has been a key driver for the academy as now, more than ever, a higher level of workforce skills can be a key differentiator in value terms where companies cannot compete on price,” said Crowther.
NSAPI will be funded by a combination of private and public funding, with contributions for its set-up costs coming from employers, the Learning & Skills Council and Regional Development Agencies. According to Crowther, many employers have already provided funding to support the project, although he would not reveal specific details.
“I hope the NSA will offer new solutions for SMEs to be able to improve the skills and knowledge of our workforce,” commented Peter Jackson, a member of the NSAPI shadow board and MD of Reaxa, a Manchester-based company that provides specialist products and technologies to the chemical industry.
According to Crowther, the academy project team have “not just approached the larger companies in the sector for contributions, but have asked all employers to contribute what they are able as the academy will be there to service the skills needs of all the sector, from SMEs to multinationals.”
Numeric targets have yet to be finalised for the NSAPI business plan, but the aim is to make significant inroads into the skills gaps identified in the Sector Skills Agreement undertaken by Cogent SSC during the last two years.
For new entrants this will be achieved by targeting increases in the number of process-specific apprenticeships for both young people and adults, as well as introducing innovative skills solutions to ensure skilled workers choose to work in the process industries. At the same time, NSAPI will drive initiatives to ensure that the skills levels of the existing workforce are increased in order to create value for the employer and employee by achieving the gold standard industry qualification.
Unlike some of the other academies that are being established, NSAPI is not looking to build a large new training facility in one geographic location. Instead, it will look to work with existing providers to increase capacity and capability, while ensuring the best standards of training delivery are achieved.
“We have some excellent examples of providers who are working closely with employers and providing high quality training,” said Crowther. “It is our aim to work with these lead providers to share some of this best practice and expand the current provider network to ensure better geographical coverage for our sector and greater numbers of skilled people within our industry sectors.”
