Vocational training and the skills a rebuild needs

Every reconstruction estimate is expressed in money. It could equally be expressed in person-years of skilled trades, and that expression makes the constraint visible immediately.

What the shortage actually is

Certified welders, particularly for pressure and structural work. Machine operators for excavators, cranes and drilling rigs. Electricians qualified to work on medium and high voltage. Fitters, pipefitters and instrument technicians.

These are not interchangeable and none can be trained in a month.

What the system inherited

A large network of vocational colleges, historically attached to specific industrial enterprises which provided the equipment, the practice placements and a job at the end.

When those enterprises closed, the colleges kept the buildings and lost the equipment, the placements and the employment guarantee. A welding course taught on equipment three decades old produces a graduate who has to be retrained on arrival.

What works

Employer partnership, in which a company equips a workshop, sends its own people to teach and takes graduates. This is happening and it works, and it requires an employer large enough to plan two years ahead.

Short modular courses with recognised certification, for people retraining rather than starting out — which describes a great many adults right now.

And qualification recognition that means something to a foreign employer, since a Ukrainian welding certificate that maps onto an international standard is worth considerably more to the holder.

Why this is reconstruction policy

Because money arriving without trades to spend it on produces wage inflation and imported labour. Training capacity is the thing that has to be built first, and it has the longest lead time.

This is my most concrete problem and I can give the figure: applications to a welder advertisement fell to a third in five years. These are the people who will carry out the reconstruction, and the issue is not the number of schools but which machines those schools train on. As somebody who has sold equipment for twenty years: you do not train a 2020s operator on a 1980s machine tool.