Issue link: https://read.utilityweek.co.uk/i/665572
NETWORK / 28 / APRIL 2016 SkillS – when compared with faster- moving sectors like automotive, aerospace and electronics that can offer higher wages and overseas travel. Ellins, though, is confident that with the right level and tone of consistent marketing, energy networks can sell an attractive story to potential recruits. To do so, however, he warns against overworking the STEM skills narrative and also urges companies to build on collaborative initiatives so they are truly selling a sector story. Typically, Ellins says, companies have tended to talk too much and too quickly about "skills and the skills 'cliff edge'" when appealing to new talent. "But if you go into live businesses the actual issues are around replacing retiring workforce and getting people to wake up in the morning and realise why they want to work in the energy and utilities sector." "We don't need to talk to all of those people about the importance of STEM education. For many of them the story will be about being able to support their local community and put something back into it. So much of the story is about workforce and employment and less about skills and education." Getting the more emotive and lifestyle-based story right should lead naturally to a pipeline of appropriately motivated talent that is likely to want to remain in the sector, even if it moves about within it – which brings Ellins to his second key focus point for industry: skills mobility. It's already been mentioned that many of the skills needed to fulfil the requirements of the NIP are common across all the sectors involved, and it is certainly true that the skills required in the energy industry to meet the challenges of a decarbonising and decentralising the energy system are largely common across energy networks. "That's where the industry could really work together," Ellins enthuses, "to give someone a skills passport so that they can work across these areas and not see the gap – apart from some of the finer points of training, which we can tweak when they get into our sector." Such frameworks should let networks – and the wider utilities industry – develop more flexible approaches to finding resources to meet their needs, and give individuals more freedom to follow opportunities in the sector. They would alleviate fears that companies will find it impossible to individually recruit the number of people they need to work on upcoming programmes and should result in common frameworks for the accreditation and assurance of individuals. This in turn would minimise the amount of training that companies have to invest in for new recruits and make the money made available by Ofgem in the last price review for investment in skills go further. In short, Ellins insists that the vision of skills passports and sector-wide assurance frameworks makes economic, operational and career- enhancing good sense. And although it may seem a far cry from traditional business approaches to human resources and recruitment, he says it is a vision that chief executives on the board of the recently reformed EEIP have bought into, as well as a priority work area for groups in the National Skills Academy. It's also an ambition that is technically achievable by making the most of EU Skills' Talent Resource Platform, which matches talent with vacancies. Ellins is clearly committed and passionate about bringing greater consistency, efficiency and pragmatism to the future of workforce planning across the utilities sector. And though he knows that volatility in government policy has recently burned confidence in the stability and longevity of collaborative approaches, his message is clear: it is only through retaining and growing collaborative approaches to workforce strategies that industry will truly begin to change its skills outlook. N Speeding to market T he Power Networks Demonstrations Centre near Glasgow is a not-for- profit facility that attempts to shorten time to market for new power network technologies. It does this through a process of intensive failure testing on its unique private network. The centre has been open almost two years and here we profile some technologies that have made the leap to real network application. The Power Networks Demonstrations Centre takes novel technologies from the drawing board to the network. →