Rail Industry Focus

Creating career opportunities through UTC Crewe

Mathew Conway, managing director of OSL Rail, talks to RTM about the company’s involvement in the new University Technology College located in Crewe.

Nelson Mandela once said that education is the most powerful weapon to change the world. This has resonance in the rail industry, seeking to plug a growing skills gap.

University Technical Colleges (UTCs) can encourage 14 to 19-year-olds to pursue careers in engineering and high-skill manufacturing. One of the new UTCs, in Crewe, wants to engage a new generation of workers to enter the rail sector.

UTC Crewe will cater for up to 800 students when it opens in September 2016. The scheme involves Cheshire East Council, Bentley Motors, MMU, Siemens, Bosch, OSL Rail, Jacobs Engineering, Chevron Racing, Optical 3D and South Cheshire Chamber of Commerce. The partners want to create an academic centre to help young people while also helping industry by generating employees for the future.

The fundamental difference between a typical school and UTC Crewe will be the approach to teaching. Academic learning will be blended with technical skill sets. Even an English GCSE lesson, for example, will be grounded in the world of work. And an engineering design project will build on learning from GCSE Maths.

OSL involvement

Mathew Conway, managing director at OSL Rail and now a trustee of UTC Crewe, told RTM: “We will contribute in the practical projects and learning at the UTC. For instance, we will put together a programme of real-life problems for the students to work on over a week, or a few hours a week over a term. This will show them the reality of the real world in terms of work, projects specific to real-world applications and issues we see every day in the railway.”

UTC Crewe will have long teaching days, 8am to 5pm – replicating the world of work. Conway hopes this will help develop the right attitude and aptitude for working once the students are ready to leave the UTC.

From 2016, OSL will offer UTC Crewe students courses on basic signalling systems and electrification. “For instance, we will get them thinking about how you make a train run on a basic bog-standard loop,” he said. “Then, how we want that train to go around the loop and call at a mandatory stop point – like a station – bang on the hour, every hour.”

As the pupils progress through the UTC, OSL will then introduce other obstacles so they understand the practical and theoretical complexities of working in the rail industry.

Conway said: “We’ll discuss things like building a brand new line like HS2. But we won’t just be talking about the ‘easy bit’ [track and signalling], the course will address the environmental impact, logistics, highways, and everything you need to consider when working on a large-scale infrastructure project.”

OSL will accommodate UTC students in its new RETA training facility (Railway Exchange Training Academy) in the centre of Crewe, next to the station. The 80x30m facility will contain three track sections for authentic, hands-on rail training. It should be fully operational by mid-2015. Conway and his business partner, John O’Boyle, believe the facility (which will also be used by the company’s own teams) will offer great hands-on training.

Addressing a tough issue

Not enough teenagers and students want to work in rail, Conway said, meaning that for now the industry has to proactively entice them.

Both Conway and O’Boyle have apprenticeship backgrounds and, although they concede that UTCs will not rectify rail’s whole skills gap, they do believe UTCs will help bring back some lost skills.

“From a legacy point of view in the rail industry, and the wider school industry, what has happened over the last 20-30 years is that everyone has been told to go to university,” said Conway. “Now things are swinging the other way – getting people involved with apprentices. UTCs can help bridge the gap.

“We also hope this will give young people inspiration, because to aspire you need inspiration, and at the moment they don’t have that in the north west and Crewe.”

Crewe will be the only UTC with a training school dedicated to rail, which could help save the industry money in the long-term by attracting the right candidates and ensuring retention within the industry. He added that to get someone out on track usually costs around £5,000 once they have undertaken a PTS course. But not everyone sticks with it and ends up working in the industry, creating risk for recruiters.

So the UTC is likely to fund students through a PTS course, and will put them through – using the RETA facilities – a Module 5 testers course.

Conway couldn’t guarantee that every individual would walk into a job with OSL, but was confident that graduates would get jobs with one of the major companies involved.

“It is a bold statement to make, but I believe if young people have the right courses, skillset and attitude, and that you remove the recruitment risk, the companies are more likely to take a punt,” he said.

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