SKILLS & TRAINING
A ‘significant shortfall of people’: signal engineering demand to outstrip supply in CP5
NSARE recently completed a major study into the UK’s signal engineering resources and requirements for 2014-19, commissioned by Network Rail. RTM spoke to NSARE’s head of training and skills, Elaine Clark.
N
etwork Rail’s programme director signalling, Mark Southwell, took a great
for
interest in work done by NSARE (the National Skills Academy for Railway Engineering) on skills forecasting, published early last year. That project showed a significant ‘gap’ between the number of rail engineers available and the scale of works in the pipeline.
He asked NSARE to dig deeper, and commissioned a specific study – on behalf of the industry – into signal engineering resources specifically.
The results of the study were presented at a well-attended seminar on 27 March at the British Library.
The headline finding is that the industry will potentially be more than 2,000 signal engineers short of requirements in 2016-17, one of the years where the ‘gap’ is at its peak. In reality workloads will be ‘smoothed’ to try to account for this, and improved ways of working will be developed, but NSARE says that even so, “we should still anticipate a significant shortfall of people when we take into account replacing at least some of those who will retire, who will take a huge amount of experience with them”.
The study
NSARE’s head of training and skills Elaine Clark (pictured above) explained that this study went into more detail than the previous industry-wide skills forecasting project (RTM interviewed NSARE’s Gil Howarth about that work in our Feb/March 2013 edition).
She said: “Instead of looking at two or three skill levels, we looked at 30-plus specific job
38 | rail technology magazine Apr/May 14
roles linked to the IRSE licensing categories. When getting data from different companies, we needed to ensure we were ‘comparing apples with apples’, and those categories were the ideal way to do that.”
The study updated NSARE’s database of upcoming projects in the light of the ORR’s determination for CP5, and revealed an aggregated project workbank for CP5 that amounts to some £5.9bn. Of this, 75% relates to Network Rail, and the rest to TfL, Crossrail, light rail and initial HS2 works. This is larger than the previous estimate, partly because it includes a more thorough analysis of the signal engineering elements of other projects.
Mark Southwell
NSARE says that based on data returns, the estimated signal engineering workforce is 9,200, of whom just over half work in projects and renewals. Only 4% are aged over 60, and the overall age profile is less of a concern than in other parts of the industry – especially traction and rolling stock.
The peaks and troughs in the workbank – a notorious problem for the rail industry – are a bigger issue, and one which Network Rail and other major client organisations have been trying to address across all engineering disciplines.
Another is that the proportion of recruitment needed at higher skill levels – technicians and professional engineers – is higher than previously thought, now being closer to 50% than 30%.
Clark said: “That is a particular challenge for the industry, because recruiting several hundred – up to 1,000, maybe – technicians and engineers over the next five years is not an easy challenge. It’s probably impossible. So, in the immediate term, people with experience from other industries will need to be brought in and trained up quite quickly. We can’t generate people from scratch in these timescales. CP5 has already started and the challenges of delivering it are upon us.”
Practical improvements
Alongside the quantitative analysis, the project also looked at qualitative issues. These included the ‘international dimension’ (the oft- stated theory that the gap stems from good UK engineers moving abroad), the scale and quality of graduate and apprenticeship schemes for
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