Nuclear Skills Passport

Vision

Working together to develop and sustain a qualified, mobile workforce with  transferable skills that enable career progression in a world-class nuclear industry.

Description

The Nuclear Skills Passport will provide all employees and contractors within the  Nuclear Sector, including those from large employers and SMEs, with a physical
record of their industry specific training and qualifications that meet the agreed sector standards.

The Passport will address the change in skills needs required to deliver the  decommissioning programme through the NDA, maintaining a skilled workforce to
continue maintenance of operations and the whole fuel cycle, defence and the new growth areas of New Build and Waste Management.

Currently, to address the peaks and troughs of skills demand in the Nuclear sector, employers recruit, train and develop employees as and when staff are needed.

For employers this raises the following issues;

• Continual high costs of recruitment and training.
• Negative socio-economic impact (loss of local skills base).
• Lack of availability of staff required.
• Difficult to compete for tenders (no evidence of staff competence and expertise).

The Nuclear Skills Passport will address these issues by enabling employers to;

• Reduce costs by focusing on re-skilling and up skilling the current workforce, rather than recruiting and training new staff.
• Contractors will be in a stronger position to tender for new work as they will be able to evidence the skills and competence of their workforce to nationally recognised standards.
• Enhances the image of the sector by demonstrating that nuclear employers value and invest in staff training and development, thus aiding recruitment.
• Retain and develop local people for local jobs (positive socio economic impact).
• Substantial cost reductions and time savings by reducing the need for repeat and duplicate training as people and companies move from one site to another.
• To have the desired impact on the sector the Passport requires an Industry wide approach to develop and retain the Nuclear UK skills base.

Benefits

• Improved performance by providing a system to assess training against agreed quality standards and the recording of industry/role specific competencies.
• Provides “portability of employment” between sites as a result of training standardisation and national recognition.
• Standardise the level at which trainers operate.
• Raises the profile of the industry.
• Provides secure management of training records and a single access point for the recording of all transferable industry training records.
• Visible Career Paths, enabling upskilling and skills gap analysis through the Nuclear Industry Training Framework (NITF) in addition to training
  signposting.
• Verification process for all training records input onto the passport system.
  

Benefits Employees:

The Passport will allow an individual to record all their skills development and training in a clear and coherent manner recognised by all nuclear employers.

The Nuclear Industry Training Framework, will enable individuals to gain new qualifications and training over time, again rewarding and accrediting the time they spend on skills development. This provides a sense of achievement and leads them to achieve far greater career development and opportunities. As one area of the sector is diminishing the Passport will ensure individuals remain
competitive in a changing labour market.

Limits of the Skills Passport

The Nuclear Skills Passport will not carry details of security clearances or act as an identity document to gain site access. Existing site security systems and training on the knowledge  of local procedures will remain unchanged.

The Nuclear Skills Passport will not replace existing SQEP management systems in the
short term. However, it will aid licensees, by providing a physical system for proof of skills, in particular for the contractor workforce.

The Result

A more transferable and flexible workforce will be formed that can close the skills gap in all sub-sectors of the industry.

Nuclear Industry Training Framework (NITF)

The Skills Academy and Cogent are are working to produce the (NITF) to recognise the
training and qualifications of relevance to the nuclear industry, assigning a credit and level value to each component part, based on the commonly accepted principles of credit.

This framework will be constructed to accommodate both formal and informal learning, meaning that it will have the flexibility to recognise training provided by individual employers, measured against national standards.

A key aspect of the NITF is its intention to recognise achievement of progress towards
a competence profile this will initially be based on around 13 Job Contexts for example, Decommissioning Operations, Energy Production Operations, Process Operations, Safety and Security etc, with each Job Context having 5 associated roles from an operations level up to senior management.

Employer Involvement

The Nuclear Skills Passport is strongly supported by both small and large employers
from all key regions of Nuclear activity in the UK. An employer led Nuclear Skills Passport Project Board has been set up by the Skills Academy to implement the Project Vision, Aims and Objectives nationally and ensure successful strategic planning of the whole Nuclear Skills Passport approach in the Nuclear Industry, including implementation and roll out.