TRAINING & SKILLS
Price structure
Organisations wanting to use SkillsID will pay a single tax-deductible annual fee based on company size – £250 for micro-businesses with 10 or fewer employees, up to £10,000 for the largest businesses with more than 1,000 employees, as below:
Employees
1,000-plus = £10,000 251-1000 = £5,000 101-250 = £2,000 51-100 = £1000 11-50 = £500 1-10 = £250
There is a 10% discount for NSARE members, it is free for trainers and assessors, and early adopters – those signing up before June 30 2013 – get a further 20% discount and free help from the NSARE team.
TfL and National Rail Contractors Group endorsement
TfL infrastructure programme director George McInulty told the audience that decades of under-investment in rail meant the industry was now playing “skills catch-up”, but that SkillsID would allow “full sight of the national skills landscape”. He added: “I commend, and recommend to you, SkillsID.”
National Rail Contractors Group chairman Paul Kirk, who sits on the NSARE board of directors, said SkillsID pulls together all the main threads NSARE has been working on, while his fellow board member Steve Scrimshaw, MD of Siemens’ UK rail business, said his company will support SkillsID and use it for its own staff.
The NSARE vision
Howarth said NSARE’s vision when it was founded in 2010 was that every member of the rail engineering workforce would have demonstrable competences achieved through accredited training.
Assessment and accreditation of training providers has already begun, with the fi rst set of results delivered in September 2012, with six companies rated ‘outstanding’ – RT Training Solutions (Railtech Group); Vital Skills
32 | rail technology magazine Apr/May 13
In terms of skills forecasting, he gave examples connected to the work NSARE has been doing with Network Rail preparing for ERTMS.
He said the number of people working on the railway today who will be directly impacted by the implementation of ERTMS stands at around 180,000, just over half of whom are railway engineers (with the rest in operations and other areas).
About a third of the workforce will need a
“It’s with a good deal of personal and collective pride that I welcome the launch of SkillsID here today.
“It’s a key step forward.” TELL US WHAT YOU THINK
To fi nd out more or sign up, visit
www.nsare.org To see the slides from the launch event, visit
www.nsare.org/news-room/latest-news/ skillsid-launch-presentations-now-available. aspx
Training; Scot-Train; Nestrack; TQ Catalis; and Bridgeway Consulting, which got the best score overall. 70% of the companies inspected were rated ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’, which is now the minimum acceptable for accreditation. Beginning this year, Network Rail itself is not taking external training provision from anyone rated less than ‘good’ [there was full coverage of the training assessment results in RTM October/November 2012].
The launch of SkillsID means NSARE is starting to fulfi l the ‘demonstrable competences’ part of the vision.
Howarth added: “We believe SkillsID will add signifi cantly to improving safety on the railway – not that it’s unsafe at the moment, but we’ve got to get better. It’s also about getting value for money and doing more with less.”
Skills forecasting
Howarth said SkillsID is not only fantastic for employers and individuals, but also for the industry as a whole, as it will provide accurate and up-to-date data to help with skills forecasting and training requirements for the future [more on this in RTM Feb/March 2013].
“signifi cant amount of upskilling”, Howarth said. “SkillsID will be a vital way of learning more about who has what skills and competences.”
A cohesive skills strategy
In response to a question from a member of the Skills Development Agency concerned that such a database could be used by unscrupulous employers to create a kind of ‘blacklist’, as was seen in the construction industry, NSARE said it would “deal with” any inappropriate information added onto the database, ensuring that such a situation could never arise.
Jeremy Candfi eld, director general of
the Railway
Industry Alliance (RIA) and a member of the NSARE board, spoke at the SkillsID launch to explain why RIA was so keen to promote NSARE from the beginning.
He said: “Why did we take on the lead promoter role? Because we could see the key
Above: Jeremy Candfi eld
need for a cohesive skills strategy, in an industry with numerous
individual initiatives but no overall industry co-ordination. Providing that co-ordination would be an important role for NSARE.
All photos © Sam Lane
www.samlanephotography.co.uk
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