AMC participation in MATES AQUATERA Workshop
AMC presentation and Round Table discussion at the stakeholder workshop held in Aberdeen on 17th May.
The topic? Occupational Profiling as a Mechanism to address Skills Gaps. Slides from the presentation can be found here.
Summary of the round table discussion:
- It is important to find out how much the industry is consulted with regard to designing academic and other vocational courses.
- It is also important for academic and vocational courses to have a feedback loop whereby their graduates work in the field in which they were trained. This is an important asset.
- There is often a pressing need for graduates to have short training courses. Such short courses should fit into the Skills Portfolio. People should be able to show evidence or validation of what they have done, though not necessarily in terms of ECVET credits.
- It is very important to have industry feed into the mechanisms for filling skills gaps.
- It is extremely important for people in the sector to have a diverse set of skills. There is a need for multidisciplinary approach because of the unknown unknowns. When you look at a wind turbine training course. It can be quite detailed, but it might be interesting to do a wind turbine intro course for someone in other specialities- e.g. Consents and licensing or ecology.
- Staff could earn the right to do short term sabbaticals, after a period of time, eg. after two years in post, a staff member could do a two-week training course in a subject not directly related to their work, or gain experience as an intern in another company
- Training mechanisms needs to maintain a level of flexibility and/or customisability. There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution to addressing skills gaps. Mechanisms used by very large companies such as Google, whereby staff have opportunities to work on a project entirely separate from their usual work for one day a week in order to share experiences and learning with other staff and learn about other projects, are simply not feasible for smaller companies.
- There is nevertheless a need for any new training mechanisms to be recognised or certified at a national or EU level
