Jaguar Land Rover acts to close skills gap

JAGUAR Land Rover is to expand its pioneering new education programme, aimed at boosting the skills of engineers working within the automotive supply chain and other hi-tech industries.
 
The Advanced Skills Accreditation Scheme (ASAS) was formally launched by Business Secretary Vince Cable at the company’s product development centre in Gaydon, Warwickshire.  
 
JLR is bidding to recruit thousands of skilled workers in order to meet demand for its vehicles. It has recently recruited a further 2,000 staff to work at its Solihull and Halewood plants and up to 1,000 more are expected when it opens its new engine plant in Wolverhampton in 2014.

However, with the expansion planned by the company over the next decade it is thought many more skilled workers will be needed and it is keen to ensure there is no skills gap by training up current graduates now.

The new sector-wide skills programme, led by Semta the sector skills council for Science, Engineering and Manufacturing Technologies, is supported through the Government’s Growth and Innovation Fund.  Through the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, £1m is being injected to enable the expansion of the scheme beyond JLR to boost the UK’s high-level engineering skills.     
 
The ASAS education scheme is based on a programme developed by JLR in partnership with leading English universities, including: Warwick, Loughborough, Cranfield, York, Coventry, Southampton and Bradford. It offers engineers the chance to develop the green and future engineering skills which will be needed to create world-leading new products and technologies over the next decades.
 
Mr Cable said: “This is the sort of innovative idea that will help address the crippling shortage of trained engineers in the UK. It’s fantastic that JLR sees benefit not just of making itself competitive but also collaborating across the sector to help make British advanced manufacturing increasingly competitive”
 
Mike Wright, JLR’s Executive Director, said: “JLR has already begun the largest advanced engineering skills programme in the UK, to help us to deliver our low carbon vehicles of the future. We are planning for more than half of our 6,000 engineers to take part in the programme.

“If UK companies are going to be able to compete successfully in the future, we need to raise the skill levels throughout the supply chain and UK manufacturing as a whole.”

Lynn Tomkins, Semta’s UK director of operations, said the programme would transform higher education opportunities for all employers, particularly SMEs.

“It’s exactly what is needed and it is fantastic that they have worked with us to broaden the benefits to more employers. Lack of high level skills is one of the barriers to economic growth and this significant investment will go some way to addressing the issue,” she said.

The new scheme is expected to involve engineers from more than 2,000 companies in England taking 5,000 Master’s degree module places over the next two years.
 
Bob Joyce, JLR’s Engineering Director, said: “JLR originally developed the scheme to raise the skill levels among our employees, and over a two-year period more than 1,000 engineers have been through the programme.
 
“The next generation of green, high performance products demand very different concepts and technologies, and our engineers need to be equipped to deliver those innovations.
 
“The Advanced Skills Accreditation Scheme offers supply chain companies access to Master’s level education tailored to their business needs, from a network of the best universities.”