BAE Systems, a prime industrial player for British naval contracts, has opened its third training facility based at its shipyard in Scotstoun, Glasgow on the banks of the River Clyde.
A new Academy – encompassing 5,500 square metres – will offer space and training resources for life-long learning opportunities for the company’s entire workforce – as many as 4,500 people in the region.
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BAE Systems’ Glasgow Academy follows similar investments made in Samlesbury and Barrow-in-Furness, two other training sites in the North-West of England.
The £12m ($15.6m) learning hub comes as part of a wider initiative to consolidate the company’s capacity to deliver UK Royal Navy projects in the future. This includes the Type-26 frigate programme, for which the shipbuilder has also constructed a new ship-build hall in Scotstoun to house the warships, recently named Janet Harvey Hall.
Skills deficit
Particularly, the site will support the apprentices and graduates in the company’s Naval Ships division as BAE looks to attract talent amid an increasing shipbuilding skills deficit.
Though, Britain is not alone in meeting this challenge as the US naval industrial base similarly faces problems as naval construction has come to rely on a retiring workforce with fewer people to take up the mantle in the next generation of welders, pipe fitters and machinists.
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By GlobalDataEdward Bartlett, a former submariner and CEO of Bartlett Maritime, a corporation with a mission to reverse the US submarine shortfall, told Naval Technology that they are implementing new solutions to tackle the crisis.
“This is a different approach in that we’re tapping into another source of skilled trades, in another sector of the industry of the marketplace, and making them available to the [US] Navy.”
In the UK, Guidant Global’s client solutions director and British Army veteran, Joel Forrester, relayed a similar position that “more must be done to recruit and retain the defence workforce of the future.”
A wider capacity initiative
According to GlobalData job analytics for global shipbuilding between May and August this year, US industries account for the largest number of jobs closed: HII with 978, General Dynamics 311.
While BAE Systems Plc – through its global operations, not just in the UK – makes the top ten, the company has only closed 16 jobs in the forecast period.
On the whole, the figures indicate pressure on prime shipbuilders to deliver naval projects as military demand grows amid geopolitical tensions. However, the companies face a capacity crisis.
BAE Systems’ new facilities, together with a range of additional investments in technologies and equipment, form an overall £300m investment in the company’s two shipbuilding sites in Glasgow over the next five years.
The rationale behind the multi-million pound investment is to reverse the falling retention rates by allowing employees career opportunities while reinforcing a new generation of shipbuilders for a renewal of intense military demand.
