Why upskilling tradespeople of tomorrow has never been more important - Danny Wild
Our rapidly growing need for cleaner energy, efficient new homes and electric vehicle infrastructure means this should be a bumper time for appropriately trained individuals and companies.
But serious skill gaps in key fields like electrics, retrofit, bricklaying and carpentry have created a bottleneck that is currently preventing us from fully exploiting those opportunities.
Numerous studies have laid out the scale of the problem, with nearly one million extra construction workers expected to be needed by 2032. To meet that demand, we will need to see a dramatic, 34 percent increase in apprenticeship completion rates along with a major upswing in training.
This represents a genuine structural challenge for the country, its educators and businesses - one that will require a significant increase in the amount and quality of training, and apprenticeship, places that are available.
The government’s plans to allow school pupils to follow technical education pathways from the age of 14 is a welcome step in the right direction in terms of early engagement, and should hopefully encourage many more young people to embark on a journey that will see them go on to join the workforce as valued tradespeople.
To succeed, however, this strategy will also need enough places waiting ‘down the line’, in further education, to ensure such students can continue and advance their training - and we know, from a number of reports this year, that this is just not currently the case.
That is why institutions like ours are investing heavily and working hard to expand capacity while ‘future-proofing’ our facilities, to ensure we can train greater numbers of the tradespeople we need for generations to come.
At Harrogate College, this has involved a complete £22m rebuild of our campus that will produce a new teaching block, complete with a digital technology suite, replica hospital ward and electric vehicle workshop, plus a standalone Clean Energy Centre.
We will also, once the work is completed later this year, have three additional electrical workspaces which will allow us to train more people and go some way towards addressing the growing demand, across Yorkshire, for access to electrical courses.
And our Clean Energy Centre, with its EV (electric vehicle) charging wall, will help additional students learn the skills they need to support electric Vehicle (EV) charger installation and repairs - techniques that will become increasingly important as we continue to transition to electric modes of transport.
Indeed, qualified electricians are among some of the most in-demand roles in the building sector at the moment, both for their contribution to conventional construction projects and newer technologies including heat pumps, solar generation, renewable energy integration and EV charging.
Sustainable construction, and especially retrofit - the process of upgrading existing properties to make them more energy efficient and environmentally friendly - is another key growth area that is urgently in need of more training support, with some 230,000 skilled workers needed by 2030.
To that end, we have been putting a lot of effort into both facilitating retrofit courses at the college and having our teachers trained, thanks to Local Skills Improvement Fund money, in retrofit methodology and techniques.
Danny Wild is Principal of Harrogate College.