I'm an employer, get me out of here
25 Mar 2008
In the March April edition of Process Engineering, Dr Stan Higgins of NEPIC gives the benefit of his considerabvle experience to examine the root causes of skills shortages in the process industries and to advise on the way forward.
In the News Analysis section (p10), Higgins describes an increasingly dog-eat-dog world as regards recruitment in today’s process sector. Entire shifts of workers are leaving their companies en masse to join better-paying employers in the offshore oil & gas industries.
Such events are producing a knock-on effect of growing reluctance of small and medium sized companies to train people, because the large companies simply poach the people that they have trained.
The situation can be linked back to the decline of the UK’s industrial base and the loss of trainees from major groups such as ICI, Unilever, and Glaxo, that once trained an excess of apprentices. Meanwhile, various training initiatives by industry, academia and Government have since only served to undermine the status of industrial training, particularly apprenticeships, in the eyes of young people.
Whatever the various causes and effects, today’s reality is that most companies in the process industries still do not do their fair share of training and are not prepared to pay for the basic training of their workforce.
In a major Government review of the skills supply chain, Lord Sandy Leitch warned that unless industry gets its act together - very soon - then Government will act and legislate, forcing every company to contribute to up-skilling of the nation’s workforce through the imposition of a levy.
The new National Skills Academy Process Industries offers a more attractive alternative. The scheme may lack teeth in terms of forcing employers to pay for training, but it does offer them a path out of the current recruitment jungle.
