Training the tradespeople of tomorrow

Our rapidly growing need for cleaner energy, efficient new homes and electric vehicle infrastructure means this should be a bumper time for appropriately trained individuals and companies. But serious skill gaps in key fields like electrics, retrofit, bricklaying and carpentry have created a bottleneck that is currently preventing us from fully exploiting those opportunities.

In the article below – recently published in the The Yorkshire Post – our Principal, Danny Wild, explains how our new campus will help the region tackle the issue.

Numerous studies have laid out the scale of the problem, with nearly one million extra construction workers expected to be needed by 2032. To meet that demand, we will need to see a dramatic, 34 percent increase in apprenticeship completion rates along with a major upswing in training.

This represents a genuine structural challenge for the country, its educators and businesses – one that will require a significant increase in the amount and quality of training, and apprenticeship, places that are available.

A future-proof new campus

Students being given a tour of our under-construction new campus by developers Caddick Construction

The government’s plans to allow school pupils to follow technical education pathways from the age of 14 is a welcome step in the right direction in terms of early engagement, and should hopefully encourage many more young people to embark on a journey that will see them go on to join the workforce as valued tradespeople.

To succeed, however, this strategy will also need enough places waiting ‘down the line’, in further education, to ensure such students can continue and advance their training – and we know, from a number of reports this year, that this is just not currently the case. 

That is why institutions like ours are investing heavily and working hard to expand capacity while ‘future-proofing’ our facilities, to ensure we can train greater numbers of the tradespeople we need for generations to come.

At Harrogate College, this has involved a complete £22 million rebuild of our campus that will produce a new teaching block, complete with a digital technology suite, replica hospital ward and electric vehicle workshop, plus a standalone Clean Energy Centre.

Stepping up to support electricans

We will also, once the work is completed later this year, have three additional electrical workspaces which will allow us to train more people and go some way towards addressing the growing demand, across Yorkshire, for access to electrical courses.

And our Clean Energy Centre, with its EV (electric vehicle) charging wall, will help additional students learn the skills they need to support electric Vehicle (EV) charger installation and repairs – techniques that will become increasingly important as we continue to transition to electric modes of transport.

Indeed, qualified electricians are among some of the most in-demand roles in the building sector at the moment, both for their contribution to conventional construction projects and newer technologies including heat pumps, solar generation, renewable energy integration and EV charging.

Spreading the word on sustainable construction

Sustainable construction, and especially retrofit – the process of upgrading existing properties to make them more energy efficient and environmentally friendly – is another key growth area that is urgently in need of more training support, with some 230,000 skilled workers needed by 2030.

To that end, we have been putting a lot of effort into both facilitating retrofit courses at the college and having our teachers trained, thanks to Local Skills Improvement Fund money, in retrofit methodology and techniques.

Those teachers will in turn be cascading that knowledge to other members of staff, and our new facilities will include two retrofit rigs for learners to work on, too. This will help us as we put on more retrofit courses, including evening classes for companies that  need to upskill their staff. It will also allow us to step up our efforts to meet the local demand for these skills while building a reputation as a specialist retrofit training provider.

We will  have a solar panels unit to demonstrate how this renewable energy technology works, a full size passivhaus – a highly efficient property demonstrating ultra-low energy usage standards – plus air source heat pumps and HIVE units; it’s all about ensuring our learners can acquire the core green skills the industry needs before they join the workforce.

Businesses at the heart of what we do

CEO Steven Sexton from Techbuyer, the first business sponsor of our new campus, with students.

Employers are also very interested in training their employees in retrofit, especially, plus other bespoke green skills  – and we’re looking to extend that substantially from our new facilities, while working closely with local businesses to build upon our apprenticeships programme.

This support for the sector will also see us delivering new courses from our new campus, including health and safety classes for people who need to acquire the CSCS (Construction Skills Certification Scheme) card that’s needed to work on a building site.

This is an exciting time as we, along with fellow colleges across Yorkshire and beyond, adapt and expand to rise to the significant challenges ahead. Yes, the scale of those challenges is considerable – but so is our commitment, bolstered by our purpose-built new facilities, to rise to meet them and help our region reap the rewards.

To do so, we will be forging even closer ties with our fantastic local businesses so they can help shape our courses and ensure our students are truly ‘industry ready’ by the time they leave us. Employers should contact our Performance and Projects Coordinator, at Lynn-Yang.Liu@harrogate.ac.uk, to find out how to get involved.