Yvonne Mason OBE DL, Chief Executive of SafeSTS and a founder of UTC Norfolk, where she now chairs the Industry Liaison Group, has spoken to The Blueprint about the changing needs of employers and how UTCs are keeping up with them…

What is it your business does?

We work in ship to ship transfer. So we transfer either at sea or within the port environments, cargoes that are either being exported or imported.

The export may well be because there is insufficient country infrastructure, so we kick start the process. So with the early stages of development in a country like Senegal, for example, we’re helping to set up their supply chain to receive energy into the country.

At the moment it’s oil, but it’s moving into more green opportunities. So we’re also part of supply chains looking at LNG, ammonia, hydrogen, ethylene, all the new green fuels. That will require new processes, new operating processes, it requires new equipment to suit the materials being transferred.

What have been the major changes to the needs of employers over the last five years in your view?

War makes a big change to us, geopolitics makes a big change to us.

Climate change is having a huge impact on us. In areas where we used to be able to operate with impunity all year round, we’re now finding seasonal issues. We’re finding very quick changes in weather patterns that are giving rise to short, sharp, snap and nasty weather events. So we’re having to amend our processes and procedures, we’re having to bring in engineered safety equipment to cope with the eventuality of a breakout [of fuel]. 

COVID also hit us very badly. It had a huge impact on the business because we’re global, we need to move. We can’t move if we’re pinned down by COVID.

We try and have teams in place around the around the world in time zones. So part of our challenge is managing time zones, culture, language, everything, as part of our day job. It’s a big challenge to find people to do that, and there’s no formal training for what we do.

The master mariners that do the operations between the ships are formally trained, but we have to train them again to do what we do, because they never actually berth two moving ships together.

How do you think the education system, the skills system can better prepare people for those problems?

We find the students that we take on from UTC Norfolk [UTCN] come to us partly prepared because they’re used to working with industry. They do projects on a regular basis. They have interaction with employers on a regular basis.

We talk to those companies, which are in different sectors, and they are all finding the same issues.

Materials are changing, which affects anything we teach our students in, for example, aviation where the composites in different steel grades have to cope with these very aggressive green fuels. Biofuels eat the old equipment.

Materials and process engineering are two big things we find on our radar constantly.

It would be helpful for students to have an understanding of the global supply chain and the local supply chain and how it impacts on them. There’s no training for that which we can find.

Fundamentally, the practical hands on opportunity that UTCs offer is fantastic and that’s what the companies are looking for when they’re employing. What actual practical experience have you got, is the student used to handling tools, are they used to having different materials? Do they understand how a CAD system works? Can they design something? Can they work in 3D? Do they have any experience of robotics?

If we can start, at least, to get an inkling of that in the curriculum, that makes a big difference to the work of the young people we take on.

What do you think of the efforts of UTCs to keep up with the needs of employers?

I think we’re one of the biggest deliverers of T Levels in the country and that’s working well because of our industry partnerships that we can get the placements.

There is an issue with keeping equipment up to date. For example, if you take Haas, a major provider of CNC machine tools, they are changing their software every six to eight weeks. So while they’re very kind to give us a machine to have in our workshops, it’s out of date very quickly, so we have to start looking at desktop solutions or augmented and virtual reality in order to train.

In shipping, we work with augmented and virtual reality to do everything from incident and accident investigation to planning a brand new ship. We even use it to give the crew the experience of working on that ship before they even set on the deck.

The old classroom learning, hard book learning, I’m sorry, it’s really not how we teach. I’m hearing from things like Metaverse Learning, there is a 25 per cent increase in the speed of learning by using mixed reality.

Offshore wind companies train the turbine technicians using mixed reality because if an employee works at height, they need to understand how it feels. If you pay to train somebody to work at height and then it transpires they have a fear of heights, you’ve got a problem.

This is where you can practise it in virtual reality and know whether it’s for you or not. And you can make mistakes. You can make mistakes with no harm to anybody and learn from it, without massive and costly implications to industry. That’s why I think there’s a big opportunity.

If you look at anything in construction, they’re completely rethinking how they build, what they build with, which means there are a million and one opportunities for young people to get involved in something really quite exciting.

We had the Future of Work conference a couple of weeks ago. Fantastic, absolutely fabulous to hear what those guys are doing. British Sugar’s young engineers have been given the task of remodelling packaging to turn the whole business into a sustainable one; that’s a heck of a piece of work. And that’s being done by relatively young engineers.

We know young people are keen on sustainable jobs and industry absolutely needs people.