Opinion
Andy Dowling, business development manager for University of Derby Corporate (UDC), the university’s corporate training and development division, questions whether the industry is ready to take on the UK’s ambitious rail projects
L
iving and working in Derby I find myself based in one of the UK’s greatest railway engineering cities and what’s considered to be the densest cluster of rail-related companies in Europe*.
Although much of Derby’s historic rail heritage has gone, and despite the blow dealt to Bombardier a couple of years ago, it’s clear that passion for the industry and the desire to take advantage of future investment in Britain’s rail network is stronger than ever.
This drive and determination to grab the unrivalled opportunities that will be generated by the government’s rail spending plans, which will see more than £25 billion invested in more than 200 major rail projects over the next
seven years, and Network Rail’s planned expenditure of £37.5 billion up to 2020, is exactly what the city, and the country, needs.
Surely there’s nowhere better than the UK to take on these ambitious rail projects? No workforce more skilled? As the UK is considered to be one of the global leaders of the rail industry you’d have thought the answer would be ‘of course not’, right? Wrong actually. When you delve more deeply into the sector it doesn’t take long to discover that the UK is experiencing a severe skills shortage. NSARE (National Skills Academy for Railway Engineering) estimates a need for up to 2,000 signalling and telecommunications professionals and around 1,000 electrification and plant engineers in the next few years alone.
If this shortage isn’t addressed it will have a serious impact on the industry’s ability to fulfil the demanding and highly skilled projects set to come on stream, for example the development of HS2 and the electrification of the Midland Main Line. So how can the sector find itself faced with the opportunity to take on some of the most ambitious rail projects since the Victorian era without having a big enough and sufficiently qualified workforce to deliver them? To start with engineering isn’t considered to be a particularly sexy sector – certainly not among teenagers, our future workforce – which is worrying when research by Engineering UK suggests that one in five young people will need to become an engineer 'if the UK has any chance of addressing the
June 2013 Page 77
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132