As the organisation celebrates the successes of the past three years, we look back at the 10 biggest achievements to date:
1. The first, and most important perhaps, was ensuring the very existence of Energy & Utility Skills, by building and then delivering a sustainable and independent business model. This followed Government policy reforms that removed all financial support for the sector skills bodies and their new employer Industrial Partnerships.
2. Forging the Energy & Utilities Skills Partnership and its senior leadership Council. It was a proud moment to see so many leading sector CEOs around one table, ready to take a huge step towards tackling the sector’s labour market challenges.
3. Developing the inaugural Workforce Renewal & Skills Strategy and implementing wide-ranging stakeholder collaborations right across the UK to deliver its aims.
4. Seeing workforce resilience embedded as a formal requirement within regulatory price reviews, with clear recognition of the workforce as a vital asset. A key achievement.
5. Creating a new dialogue with central and devolved governments in seeing the need for one coordinated approach in tackling post-Brexit labour market and workforce resilience challenges, whilst recognising the utility industry as a sector of core strategic value.
6. Providing an incredibly successful apprenticeship end-point assessment service for industry employers, the Energy & Utilities Independent Assessment Service. This has led the way in delivering apprenticeship reforms and graduating high-quality apprentices into our sector.
7. Delivering an employer-led Apprenticeship & Technical Education Advisory Group (ATEAG), to enable the utility sector to outperform others in recovering its apprenticeship levy.
8. Creating Energy & Utilities Jobs to stimulate mass talent attraction to the sector. Energy & Utilities Jobs has increasingly shown young people (particularly young women and those from minority groups) the fulfilling careers they can have in the utility world why they should start dialogue with employers.
9. Developing the Procurement Skills Accord to bring about long-lasting skills investment in the sector. The Accord has already delivered a measurable increase in the training of the utility workforce in only its first full year of operation, and is helping 50 employers work on one shared goal.
10. Last, but not least, it’s Energy & Utility Skills’ ever-increasing commitment to help bring about a safe workforce. This has involved investments in core industry programmes such as the Safety, Health and Environmental Awareness (SHEA) schemes and the National Water Hygiene Scheme and launching new Competent Operator and Licence to Control schemes.