Laying the track for the Retrofit Skills Train

Right across the UK there is a fast moving, rising demand for skilled retrofitters. The need to get people trained in time calls for agility and new ways of thinking.

Image: Catherine Kanner

Opinions vary on how many retrofit workers the UK will need over the next few years. It seems to us to be in the order of 200,000 by 2030, rising to 400,000 in the years beyond. In major urban areas, employment growth across all green sectors has already been significant. In London, for example, the number of green jobs rose from 164,000 in 2010/11 to 317,000 immediately before the pandemic. For retrofitting in particular the next decade will see rapid growth in London - towards 150,000 jobs with £10bn investment (source: GLA).

We can see this happening in real time by looking at the online jobs sites. When we last looked, filtering on ‘retrofit’ in Indeed listed 621 jobs. Even LinkedIn lists a fair chunk of retrofitting jobs in amongst the calls for Agile Transformation Master Practitioners and Interim Safer Gambling Officers. Meanwhile, we were excited to read in Construction News recently that contractors in the South West have been put on alert for £2bn of energy-efficiency and decarbonisation retrofit works for housing. Nice.

We hear, though, that money being made available for retrofitting is not being spent because of lack of people with the right skills. Even worse, it could be opening the doors for the cowboys. So what skills do we need? Well, we see recent studies in various parts of the country looking at this, as well as the deep dives into specific technologies such as the work being done by Nesta on heat pumps. And within the various standards such as PAS 2035 we see specific roles being specified - Advisors, Assessors, Designers, Installers and Evaluators.

Source: UK Green Building Council. Copyrights acknowledged.

Are we seeing a response to this from the world of occupational standards and qualifications? The answer seems to be yes. Standards and qualifications are important as a way of ensuring service quality, product safety and so on. Recently we’ve seen the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) investigating consumer protection in the green heating and insulation sectors:

The CMA is concerned about the potential for poor practices, such as making misleading claims about potential cost savings, product performance and suitability - particularly when selling newer, next generation technologies.

Source: CMA

But, the time and tide of retrofitting standards waits for no man, especially those in government. Other initiatives are building heads of steam. The Retrofit Academy, for example, has developed its own toolkit and qualifications, splitting out the advisor, assessor, co-ordinator and designer roles from the core installation trades. We can see the sense for splitting out the roles like this to build independent specialisms, but how about a multi-skilled role combining all the elements?

Certain parts of the education system are beginning to catch up. There are the much-vaunted bootcamps, of course, from colleges like Croydon and Gateshead. And recently the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) took two major steps to supply the growing demand: first, a review of its Construction occupational route, which included valuable input from the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC); and second, the development of a Sustainability Framework to guide the content of all its other occupational maps.

IfATE’s review of its Construction map – now called Construction and the Built Environment – is worth looking at a little closer. In there, we find 95 approved occupational standards, mostly at levels 2 and 3. Another six standards are currently under development. The review identified nine areas for refinement and addition, one of which was sustainability. For this, the review drew upon the work of the UKGBC along with the PAS 2030 and PAS 2035 standards¹. New potential retrofit-specific standards for coordinator and assessor were also identified in the public consultation carried out as part of the review.

Meanwhile, IfATE’s Sustainability Framework focuses all the route panels on its four main themes of Procurement and Design, Energy Source and Usage, Management of Resources, and Opportunities and Consequences. This should help ensure all occupations across the spectrum, from light- to mid- to dark-green, contain the appropriate Knowledge, Skills and Behaviours to reflect their intensity of sustainable activity.

Image: Aardman

But here’s our question. Do these new and emerging retrofit apprenticeships and training programmes really help with the immediate urgency to fill the retrofitting skills pool? In the longer term, perhaps, but let’s not forget that most construction companies are micro-businesses, 98% of which employ less than 10 people². This is both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, it means there are lots of businesses across the UK willing to do retrofit work. Small businesses are quick to adapt and learn. But on the other hand, staff don’t necessarily fit neatly into the pigeonholed occupations that match the new standards. Small, affiliated, multi- and cross-skilled teams with reimagined ways of acquiring those skills might be more appropriate here³.

This is where construction manufacturers and merchants become potentially vital. Working together with networks of local construction companies, new ideas and options for building skills could be built for the Domestic RMI (Repair, Maintenance and Improvement) sector. Equally important are the architects and civil engineers who will specify the new domestic energy systems.

And, as with much else we write and talk about on The Green Edge, local is key.  As we pointed out in our recent post, we now have valuable local initiatives like Portsmouth’s NetZero Training Hub. Elsewhere, we find Nottingham is DReEM-ing (Deep Retrofit Energy Model) a bunch of homes, part-funded with European money (still!), while co-operatives in Manchester are all driving retrofit skills forward to meet local needs.

Bottom line, this could be all about leveraging value chains and finding new ways of learning and executing at the same time. We continue to watch with a certain degree of anticipation.

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1. PAS 2030: Installation of Energy Efficiency Measures) / PAS 2035: Whole House or Building Retrofit.

2. The whole construction industry in the UK is made up of 914,000 businesses, of which only 2,360 have more than 50 employees. We’re using a narrow definition of the construction industry here, and when you talk to the construction industry itself (rather than refer to the ONS definition) you would include contracting firms, consultancy firms (architects, engineers, quantity surveyors, project managers etc.), building materials, building materials firms, plant hire firms, developers, and facility maintenance firms. See Figure 1 in CIOB’s The Real Face of Construction for more information on this.

3. Perhaps we will see “an all retrofit apprenticeship” like we are seeing in energy.