Are We Doing Enough to Train the Next Generation of Electricians?
The Electrical Show
Thomas Nargi and Paul Meenan host Keith Sanderson from the Electrical Contractors Association (ECA) to discuss the critical state of electrical training in the UK. The
Key takeaways
- Keith Sanderson highlights a critical shortage of qualified trainers and assessors due to uncompetitive salaries compared to the private sector.
- The ECA is brokering regional alliances between colleges, employers, and manufacturers to create employer-driven curricula that prioritize practical job skills over qualification specs.
Main topics
- Electrical apprenticeship shortages
- College curriculum reform
Notable quotes
I'm a great believer in that you should teach for a job, not necessarily teach for qualification.
Conclusion
The episode underscores an urgent need for systemic reform in electrical education,
Transcript preview
Speaker 4 (0:00) The Electrical Show with Thomas Nargi and Bosch Professional Power Tools. Speaker 3 (0:05) Leading Innovations. Fix Speaker 1 (0:07) Radio. Speaker 4 (0:08) On this episode, we're looking into the future of the electrical education, training and skills. And we are asking, are we doing enough to train the next generation? Speaker 2 (0:19) We'll be joined by Keith Sarneson, Head of Education and Skills at the Electrical Contractors Association. discuss apprenticeships, work placements, training standards and the challenges facing employers and colleges. There Speaker 4 (0:30) are many. There are. Paul and I are also going to share our thoughts on improving the current system and getting more Sparks electrical contractors to hire apprentices. So let's jump into it. Speaker 1 (0:43) Please remember to subscribe to our podcast and get all the latest episodes. Speaker 2 (0:48) Now joining us is Keith Sanderson, who is Head of Education and Skills at the Electrical Contractors Association. Keith, welcome to the show, sir. Thank you. Thanks for having me back. It's nice to Speaker 3 (1:00) get an invite back for a change. That's unusual for me. Speaker 2 (1:02) Thank you. You're always welcome. Speaker 4 (1:04) Now, Keith, what are the biggest training challenges that are facing the electrical sector? And how's the ECA? Or what's their plan to try and get ahead and fix some of these issues? Speaker 3 (1:16) I'd say there's a number of challenges that the sector's facing, equally, but providers face as well. So I think if I was to pick out a handful, I would say that there's difficulty in recruiting trainers. It's a challenging area to get qualified. Speaker 3 (1:37) teachers and assessors to come into to leave a sector and to come into education it's quite difficult to to recruit into those areas um there's real challenges with progression from um sort of your full-time college learning study program if you will into apprenticeships um and there's there's difficulty in accessing work placements so because they're the bits that sort of really take education over the top and um they provide that individual with a real understanding of what you know the sector's all about um eca in its role um so you know we're not like you know the government we're not like ofsted we don't have that kind of role to go in and tell people what to do but what we are doing is we're working actively um using our member network um we're working actively with the training providers and local authority to sort of highlight the challenges and look at how between us as a group we can actually start to fix some of the um some of those problems Some of it relates to, you know, for example, the work placements. Employers not understanding fully how to, you know, sort of utilize that. And equally, the conversation is not there all the time between providers and industry. It's quite a difficult thing. We found that by brokering it, we managed to get some regional solutions, which sort of feed into the national picture. But they are... sort of in early stages. So we're doing a lot of things such as our employers curriculum planning with providers so that the actual content being delivered is more relevant to sort of a trade in the modern day than, you know, what's just on an awarding body syllabus. So I'm a great believer in that you should teach for a job. not necessarily teach for qualification if you teach a job the qualification should become a byproduct um and that's the message that we we're working with providers on i Speaker 2 (3:35) i think the message is working as well i mean about four five weekends ago um a contractor um i'll name them son tech good good good contractor based in hertfordshire um their apprentices um were not taught still conjuring college and it infuriated him so much i think he's an eca member as well infuriated him so much that he actually went out and got someone to run a weekend conduit bending class and then invited loads of other electrical contractors and then they invited the master, me, to dust off the rust. And we spent an entire Saturday having a right laugh, sparks of all sorts of ages and experience and apprentices, bending conduit in his yard for an entire day with some guys who were seasoned veterans at it because he wants to do his bit to mitigate what the colleges are not doing. for me is so fantastic that someone just grabbing the ball by the horns and saying I'm not letting them skills go those skills are so important to what my business needs to succeed so I really hope other contractors around the UK start in filling the gaps that the colleges are just missing unfortunately Anyway, back to my questions. There's a lot of level two and level three apprentices struggling to find work placements, and we could easily do about a 10-hour show on this. Finishing apprenticeships is very difficult. How do you see the ECH role in trying to close the gap between apprentices and employers? Speaker 3 (4:58) Just for clarity, are you asking about those that are existing apprentices that are perhaps maybe not, perhaps being made redundant, or are you talking about people that are full-time in college that are looking to progress into their... the apprenticeship and kind of finish off the training. I think, I think Speaker 2 (5:14) both to Speaker 3 (5:14) be Speaker 2 (5:15) honest with you, because we experienced both sets of people, but yeah, both. No, let's just go for both. Speaker 3 (5:21) Yeah, okay, sure thing. So I think that where you've got the sort of unfortunate case of apprentices not being able to finish with a particular employer, and we do get a number of cases, and it is pretty heartbreaking as these things come through via social media, who can help me, who can help us. So what we're trying to do is we're utilising our employer network to basically, if we can... help that person back into a role with one of our businesses so they can finish off their apprenticeship and you know then go on and have a longer career with that business then we we signposting as best we can in that respect i'd love to say we could just you know place people but the reality is that um it's hard out there for businesses and it's a real challenge kind of taking on um apprentices a minute a lot down to the cost um which i think we maybe talked about last time i was on um about how much it now costs to take an apprentice particularly over four years um so we do try and utilize our network where we can to help people out and i think with the the sort of full-time students progressing into apprenticeships it's really difficult because to give you an example there was circa 26 000 um people that enrolled on to electrical programs full-time electrical programs last year against just over 7 100 apprentices um So there's a clear appetite for people to work in the sector. But in some respects, there's not enough seats at the table. There's not enough jobs out there to kind of absorb all those people. And, you know, all those 26,000 won't necessarily become an electrician. They'll include people that are progressing between, you know, levels one and level two or move on to a different area of study. But the real challenge is getting them from that classroom-based provision into work-based provision. And that's where the system is kind of falling down at the moment. So we're doing a lot of work around that with respect to our regional alliances. So I've already mentioned them in this chat. But one of the focuses is the low volume of people progressing and actually how can we help that. And the feedback we get from contractors is, as you sort of said, Speaker 3 (7:37) They come out without the necessary skills in all cases, which makes it difficult for a contractor to take that individual on. Particularly if they start with a blank canvas, they go for a 16-year-old school leaver as opposed to someone who's leaving college. Speaker 3 (7:59) trying to remedy that is we are now actively using you know our employees are designing curriculums as part of this alliance so they're saying this skill is missing to the providers and we're looking to the providers then to embed that into their curriculum so we've been in we've been in kent today and um the providers in kent and medway have been with our our businesses and they're actively putting together a curriculum that's driven by employers um as opposed to just looking at the awarding body specification and it's going back to teaching them the job so that actually we accept there's not enough seats at the table for everyone to get a role at the end of that but at least we can give them the best opportunity that we can