Assessing the industry’s skills requirements, revising national standards and benchmarking overseas qualifications feature in the year ahead for SummitSkills.

SummitSkills has unveiled its plans for the year ahead, identifying ways of improving productivity, reducing skills gaps, increasing learning supply and raising opportunities for employees to boost their skills throughout the sector.

As it looks to develop a Sector Skills Agreement by the end of the year, SummitSkills has a report on current skills requirements expected in May. February next year should see the results of an exercise in the benchmarking of European qualifications as well as a revision of national occupational standards.

“Improving career progression to professional levels is also high on the SummitSkills agenda,” explained chief executive Keith Marshall. “With the assistance of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, an occupational map to cover the entire building services sector will be created. As well as establishing qualifications up to and including NVQ Level 5, we will work with professional institutions and registration bodies to link schemes to occupational competence and standards.”

Projecting future skills requirements is a key objective for SummitSkills. The sector skills council is working alongside several London boroughs on a project to ensure the building services skills required for the Olympics in 2012 are in place should London win the bid. The aim is for the agreement to be transferable to the Thames Gateway project planned for the east of the city.

Source

Electrical and Mechanical Contractor