The further education sector is in the middle of a quiet staffing crisis. Around 40% of colleges have been forced to cancel courses in the last twelve months because they cannot find the staff to deliver them, according to the Association of Colleges. The shortages are concentrated in the trades. Chelmsford College is currently advertising fourteen lecturer vacancies covering brickwork, electrical and plumbing. West Nottinghamshire College's engineering and construction department has been carrying twenty unfilled posts at a time. Across the FE sector, the average general college has around seventeen unfilled teaching vacancies for every one hundred construction staff.
The result is that fewer young people are starting trade qualifications at exactly the moment the country needs more of them. Energy & Utility Skills forecasts more than 312,000 new roles needed across energy and utilities by 2030 to deliver the heat-pump rollout, low-temperature heating retrofit, solar PV, energy storage and water infrastructure programmes the government is committing to. Industry estimates put the current plumbing and heating engineer shortfall alone at around 59,000. Electrical, plumbing, brickwork and mechanical trades sit at the centre of every one of those numbers. None of them can be closed if the training pipeline is throttled at source.
The reason FE colleges cannot recruit experienced engineers as lecturers is not mysterious. The pay gap is real. A skilled installer working on commercial gas, unvented hot water systems, heat pumps or solar PV can earn well above what an FE lecturer takes home. One college principal recently told FE Week of seeing a job advert for a pipefitter offering up to £100,000. Asking experienced trades to step away from the tools full-time, at that stage in their career, is a tough ask.
But full-time college lecturing is not the only way to teach the next generation, and it has never been the only route the industry has used. The training and assessment industry runs on a different model. Experienced engineers can train and assess part-time, in evenings or at weekends, around their installer work. Training centres and colleges routinely include practising engineers to deliver training or carry out assessment work flexibly. It is a way of giving back to the trade without giving up your day rate, and for many engineers in the second half of their careers, it turns out to be the most rewarding work they have done.
The qualification routes into training and assessment are well established. The Award in Education and Training (AET) is the entry point for those wanting to teach. The Level 3 Award in Assessing Competence in the Work Environment (TAQA / A1) qualifies experienced trades to assess candidates against industry standards. Internal Quality Assurance (IQA) qualifications take it a step further for centre verification or scheme management work. Together they open the door to delivering ACS gas, plumbing, water regulations, unvented hot water (G3), heat-pump installer and wider renewables training and assessment — the exact areas where the demand for skilled assessors is highest and growing.
Coming soon from ProTech: Trades to Trainer / Assessor
At ProTech Education & Assessment, this is where we are focusing the next phase of our work. We will shortly be launching our Trades to Trainer / Assessor programmes, designed specifically for experienced plumbing, heating, gas and renewables engineers who want to make the step into training and assessment.
The programmes are built around small cohorts of likeminded engineers, learning together. We will support one another through the AET, TAQA and IQA qualifications, and build the practical teaching and assessing skills, and the confidence, the role really needs. Walking that journey alongside other engineers at the same career stage, rather than alone, is what makes the difference between people who get qualified and people who actually go on to teach.
If you have been on the tools for fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years and you have started to wonder what comes next, this is for you. Watch this space, or get in touch — we will be opening enrolment for the first cohort shortly.
The country's net zero targets, the heat-pump rollout and the wider trades workforce all depend on the next generation of engineers being taught by people who know what they are doing.
That generation needs you.