Talking the talk, walking the walk
When it comes to key players in green skills development, some members of the UK Catapult Network are on our list. We explain why.
In previous lives, we first ran into contact with the UK Catapult Network during the early days of the Space Cluster at the Harwell campus in Oxfordshire. At that time – around 2013 – we were devoting a fair chunk of our waking lives to helping a space data startup get off the ground, in a business stratosphere dominated by the wealthy but bureaucratic likes of ESTEC, Innovate UK (now part of UKRI), the relatively new kid UKSA, and Airbus Defence and Space. Into the daily whirl of proposal writing and funds-chasing came a new creature called the Satellite Applications Catapult, quickly moving in to some prime real estate at Harwell and giving out the message that they were here to be everyone’s friend, unravelling the red tape and smoothing out the roadblocks toward helping small businesses pay their (not insubstantial) costs.
More than a few SMEs were unconvinced. We remember one early town hall with the new Catapult when the head of one SME became especially vocal and heated from the front row, furious (rightly or wrongly) about the Catapult walking in and, with its new cohort of crossover recruits, taking his business.
In 2023 we’re long out of Harwell, although the startup we were helping at the time is, when we last heard, still a going concern and is still attracting investors. We can only assume that the fears of competition from what are now nine Catapults have been largely allayed; although we do note (without further comment) that the most recent review of the Catapult Network in 2021 stated that ‘the only concern raised by multiple stakeholders was that the Catapults sometimes compete for work against their sectors’. The review goes on to make a recommendation that ‘The Catapult network should develop a code of practice that provides greater transparency over how they make decisions on competing for commercial work and collaborative R&D’.
Please don’t get us wrong, the purpose of this post is by no means to cast aspersions on the Catapult Network. Quite the opposite. In fact, when we were asked in association with our City & Guilds work recently to identify a small number of organisations who we think are key to the development of green skills development in the UK, four of the Catapults – Digital, Energy Systems, High Value Manufacturing and Offshore Renewable Energy – made our top 50. Conversations we’ve had over the last few days could even add Connected Places as a fifth Catapult on our green skills ‘priority list’.
But why should that be? After all, in the roughly ten year period during which the current network was established in the wake of the original Hauser Report in 2010, skills development was never one of its core objectives.
Skills development has been bubbling up in the Catapult cauldron for quite some time now, though. The first review in 2014 said this…
Once established, Catapults should take advantage of their role as a neutral convenor to identify and help address wider barriers to innovation and commercialisation, and work with relevant parties to inform and deliver solutions. These could include regulatory and non-technological barriers such as business models and skills requirements.
…while, fast-forwarding to the aforementioned review in 2021, we see a more direct recommendation being made:
Catapults should identify whether they can introduce skills development into the next 5-year review cycle in a way that works for their sector, considers Catapult maturity, and does not compromise core objectives.
Source: Review of the Catapult Network, 2021.
See where we’re going with this? Plus, when we consider that the five Catapults we mentioned earlier either have some form of green agenda or are even green by definition, then we don’t think we can consider them as anything other than real or potential key players in green skills development going forward.
So, having set out our stall in this way, let’s take a brief look at some of the Catapults and see what they’re doing in terms of providing resources for skills development. And in doing so it may be useful to keep half a mind on international comparisons, like the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany which, with its Fraunhofer Academy, was described in the original Hauser Report as having the development of a highly skilled workforce as one of its core roles.
Image: TGE / Catapult Network
Starting with the recommendation from the 2021 review that adding a skills development remit should consider each Catapult’s maturity, it’s perhaps little surprise to find the one that appears furthest down the road is – in terms of years at least – the most mature. This is the High Value Manufacturing (HVM) Catapult, which, as our map above shows, also has the largest geographic footprint by something approaching a country mile. As far back as 2014, the network review at that time found that ‘[t]he most mature Catapult, High Value Manufacturing, has now begun to identify wider skills gaps in its sector and has developed a more active role in addressing these shortcomings’. More recently, HVM has done sterling work with our old friends at Gatsby to scope out the future Manufacturing workforce, including a skills value chain model (see below) which emphasises the early need for bodies with convening power to pull together the various stakeholders and understand the true – rather than the perceived, implied, or even hyped – skills needs.
Image: HVM Catapult / Gatsby Foundation
In terms of skills development rubber hitting the road, HVM is instrumental in the big initiatives, like DfE’s Emerging Skills project, through the development of modularised training for emerging tech, and all the way down to upskilling individuals within single companies. Plus of course, the Catapult is involved in the progression of major sustainability-centric technologies like additive manufacturing, as we mentioned in our post on Moog last year.
Hopscotching down to the right-hand end of the Catapult timeline, we find the youngest of the Catapults, Connected Places (CP)1 doesn’t have too much, if anything, to say on skills development. Understandable perhaps, since it could be perceived as being a little more, shall we say, umbrella in its brief and featuring in its lexicon such ‘imperatives’ as Connected Intelligence, Design for Experience and Resilience Technology. Still, we do note some plum areas for sustainable workforce development where we wouldn’t be too surprised to see CP become involved in the not-too-distant future, like the UK maritime sector.
In between the eldest and youngest of the Catapults, we see a broad spread in the levels of engagement with skills and workforce development. The Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult appears to be leveraging its relative maturity by backing up its assertion that ‘the UK advanced therapy and bioprocessing workforce is predicted to more than double between 2021 to 2026 resulting in a significant industry demand for talented individuals equipped with specialised knowledge and experience’ with a Skills and Training Labs facility and a prospectus that includes courses in bioprocessing, quality control and fundamental lab skills.
But in our ‘green Catapult’ list, while we see emphasis on services for research, innovation, testing and validation, supply chain growth and achieving Net Zero goals, we don’t as yet see much on workforce development. Perhaps this will change with the aforementioned recommendation from the 2021 review.
For a sustainable UK economy, we think there’s certainly the motivation for the Catapults to get more hands-on with workforce development. In particular, two of them - Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) and Energy Systems (ES) - have Net Zero right up ther in their raisons d'être, while Digital is a critical enabler. And looking at some of their recent outputs, we see ES talking about equipping building engineers to deliver Net Zero, while ORE is busy sending out STEM Ambassadors with a vision for world-leading STEM education for every young person in the UK. We’ve featured a number of other Catapult publications in our Reports Roundups, as seen on The Green Edge Data Portal.
And, as a network, they’re certainly talking about it. ‘tis but a small jump betwixt talking the talk and walking the walk, thinks The Green Edge.
Youngest in name, although it was formed by merging two former Catapults, Future Cities (2013) and Transport Systems (2014).