Doing it for the kids

To mark National Apprentice Week, Megan Darby went to Blackburn to visit Electricity North West’s new state-of-the-art training facility and get the company’s take on the skills shortage.

I’m fine, I could stay up here all day,” I lie, through gritted teeth. I am clinging to an electricity pole, supported solely by two short spikes attached to my heels. My legs are cramping and I realise with panic that I don’t know how to get down. The climbing equipment hasn’t changed in 30 years, although I am assured the safety gear has improved considerably.
There is an audience of seven for my turn as trainee lineswoman for Electricity North West. Three apprentices, one of the training staff, a press officer and a photographer look on as I stab my spiky footgear awkwardly into the wooden pole, inching up towards the wires overhead. Oh, and chief executive Steve Johnson makes time in his busy schedule to shout encouragement. I suspect he is enjoying my discomfiture.
I am visiting the distribution network operator’s shiny new £2 million training centre in Blackburn, as part of National Apprenticeship Week. With an ageing workforce and changing technology, the networks are anxious to recruit the next generation of engineers and technical experts (see box). For young people, it is a tough but rewarding job and a chance to “earn as you learn” in a sector that can confidently offer a career for life.
“We have an age profile that means about half our staff are going to retire in the next 15 years,” says Johnson. “It is a scary number.”
The networks have historic underinvestment to make up. “Right across the sector, we have real issues of skill shortages,” says Johnson. After privatisation, he says, they were under pressure to cut costs and let a lot of people go. Worse, they stopped recruiting for about a decade – “a huge mistake”.
Today’s recruits will face different challenges to their predecessors, because increasing volumes of distributed generation, electric vehicles and heat pumps connect to the grid. Even in Blackburn, not known for an excessively sunny climate, streets full of solar panels are visible on the trip from the train station. “This industry is going to change more in the next 30 years than it has in the last 100,” says Johnson. “For kids coming in now – I should stop calling them kids, it makes me sound like a granddad – the opportunities to change the industry have never been greater.”
Electricity North West is looking to recruit 14 apprentices this year and there is a healthy interest. They are expecting more than 1,000 people to apply by the 16 March deadline. “We are thankfully attracting some fantastic candidates,” says Johnson.
In a sector dominated by white men, Johnson admits the diversity figures are still “not good enough”. Of this year’s applicants, just 3.5 per cent are female and 14.4 per cent come from ethnic minorities. To try and widen the pool, Electricity North West is using school outreach programmes to promote science and engineering.
The vocational route is not just for 16-year-old school-leavers. As the cost of higher education rises, increasingly 18-year-olds with good A-levels are turning to on-the-job training instead of university.
That was the route Johnson took into the sector 30-odd years ago, living proof a trainee can make it to the top. I ask the apprentices which one of them will be in Johnson’s office in 30 years. Without missing a beat, Liam Flannery points to Rob Heyne, the tallest of the three at a whopping 6’10”. He looks at his feet, modestly. Watch this space.

Mind the skills gap

The apprenticeship is undergoing something of a renaissance at the moment. For the networks, they are vital to keeping up a skilled workforce within the cost constraints imposed by the regulator.
 “It is very difficult now to get fully competent workers,” says Neil Robertson, chief executive of Energy & Utility Skills, speaking at last month’s Networks 2014 conference. The networks face competition for trained staff from other countries (such as Australia) and sectors (such as oil and gas), which he says pay about 30 per cent more.
If they fail to invest in training, Robertson warns that networks will be left with an unpalatable choice. Either pay a premium to win back skilled workers, which Ofgem will not readily fund, or bring in labour from overseas, which doesn’t tend to go down well politically. Apprenticeships it is, then.
Creating local jobs never hurts the public image, either, and Robertson wants to see the sector make more of this. “Jobs are the biggest thing on the prime minister’s desk right now and we are not capitalising on it… We have got to get better at telling everybody.”