Phil Beach, CBE, Chief Executive of Energy & Utility Skills, spoke as a guest at the ‘Building Skills for the Future’ event during SERA’s Labour Party conference on the environment in September 2024 alongside the Skills Minister Jacquie Smith.
As an industry body working alongside other organisations and employers, Energy & Utility Skills is dedicated to addressing the workforce and skills demands necessary to support government targets for net zero and environmental progress.
Discussing the transition towards a net-zero, greener society, Beach highlighted two key themes from Ed Miliband’s earlier speech about the clean energy mission; ‘pace’ and ‘jobs’, and noted the alignment between the goals of Energy & Utility Skills and those of the Labour Party in this area. He went on to address the scale and nature of the skills and workforce challenges currently facing the sector.
Beach pointed out that 205,000 new roles will need to be filled by 2030 to meet government policy targets. This figure comes from a detailed, nine-month industry analysis, examining workforce needs by job type and level. For more insights, see the 2030 Workforce Demand Reports here.
Referring to the findings in the recently published reports, Beach noted that half of the roles required to deliver on government missions are at Level 3 and below, stressing the importance of focusing on high-quality vocational roles as well as on graduate pathways. He urged the government to broaden its focus beyond academic and quasi-academic qualifications and to pay greater attention on Level 2 and Level 3 vocational pathways that lead to high-quality jobs and urged urgent action as the delivery of net zero and environmental goals is dependent on securing a safe, skilled and sustainable workforce.
Beach concluded, saying, “we know the size of the challenge, we know what sort of approaches will work, what we would say is, we’re ready and willing to work with government to put that into action – and we need to do that quickly.”