The text below is the transcript from the East Anglia Skills and Employment video.

Video Title: East Anglia Skills and Employment

I mean skills is a key area for us, we recognise that the workforce for our future projects, actually not within the industry today. So, how have we sought about doing that? We do at all levels.

What we’ve been doing is looking at the opportunities for skills to be transferred. For skills from the fishing industry to be transferred. For oil and gas workers to be retrained, or the boat industry and other maritime industries and there’s a great convergence of skills and a huge opportunity for companies to make use of those historic skills.

One of these core programmes is Skills for Energy, where we work with the regions universities and college to try and ensure we have the pipeline of skilled workers coming forward for the future. We work on a B Eng, M Eng, BSc and MSc with the university of East Anglia in energy engineering and we also work with Lowestoft and Yarmouth campuses of the east coast college in a one year pre apprenticeship scheme called the Energy Skills Foundation programme. 

We had to go into the schools, the primary schools, educated children on STEM subjects and how that can then develop forward into opportunities that our industry would bring. We’ve been employing apprentices to come and work on the project as well. We’re looking art master ship students, in fact through the ScottishPower foundation. We’ve employed a number of master’s students, the university of East Anglia. All with a view to come in and support our projects.

 We’re also working with the offshore renewable catapult to have a presence in our region to really drive the technological advancements that are needed in the sector. 

Yes, ScottishPower renewables actually have a seat on our board. On the board. We also work very closely with them on the whole Skills agenda as well and they sit on that Skills for Energy board as well. They try to help us, assist us in trying to ensure that we have the right qualifications, we have the right people coming forward into our industry. We’ve really enjoyed working with SPR on this.