Automotive Upskilling & Reskilling Programme - results and report

Find out how Enginuity brought together leading voices in the automotive sector to make the training process more efficient for learners and employers.

The challenge - build a solid skills base while minimising disruption

The automotive industry is currently undergoing a major transition to zero-emission technologies – it’s thought this will impact over 80% of job roles involving powertrain competencies in the next ten years.

With these expected major changes to the process of vehicle manufacturing, employers will need to give serious thought to significant workforce reskilling and upskilling to minimise the risk of disruption to production.

However, the current training identification and delivery systems do not readily enable the take-up of appropriate upskilling and reskilling training, especially for smaller businesses and individuals.

• SMEs struggle to identify the needs and opportunities for upskilling, which can affect future skills development.
• This means SMEs can miss out on the adoption of and access to ‘green’ technology, which can result in boosting their productivity and financial prospects.
• Training providers don’t know what learners need to know ahead of joining the workforce, so they can’t design courses that reflect industry needs – especially for SMEs.
• There have been sector efforts to monitor the situation through activities like workforce foresighting. However, the low levels of demand and take-up for workforce upskilling in smaller businesses means we’re looking at dramatic shortages in skills and resources – and limited progress on raising productivity across the UK’s supply chains.

With these challenges in mind, the Automotive Upskilling and Reskilling Program brought together industry, education and training providers, government and other stakeholders across the sector to build on the prior work of the National Electrification Skills Framework and Forum (NESFF) and the DfE Emerging Skills Programme.

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Solution - an intelligent online platform to track development

Enginuity provided project management and stakeholder engagement for a number of partners to develop a solution, including:

• Automotive Skills Council
• The Department of Business and Trade
• West Midlands Combined Authority
• Northern Automotive Alliance (NAA)
• North East Automotive Alliance (NEAA)
• High Value Manufacturing Catapult.

The aim of the pilot phase was to develop an intelligent online platform to provide insight into skills needs and opportunities, and link employers to appropriate training provision that responds effectively to employers’ upskilling and reskilling needs.

The Automotive Upskilling platform provided access to 50 emerging short course units covering a host of different skills specialisms from across the board of advanced manufacturing. Modules included electrification, additive manufacturing, and advanced materials – at no cost for SMEs, training providers, and skills intermediaries.

The pilot scheme closed in February 2025, but the units are still accessible from the Emerging Skills Project website.

Results

The results of an evaluation survey, alongside platform data, revealed that:

• 121 users accessed the platform during the pilot programme.
• 95% of users reported that the platform was ‘Easy’ or ‘Somewhat easy’ to use.

The data available implies a mixed response to the platform in terms of the availability of course provision. But reports on the ability to review or create courses were positive.

Users who responded to the evaluation survey reported realised benefits including time saved in creating and finding short courses, with some recording time savings of 4 to 8 hours.

Our calculations and projections indicated that the total financial benefit across all users were between £1,000 to £8,500 during the pilot phase, and access to the website improved SMEs’ access to training. Our findings suggest that, if the platform was sector agnostic, with access to a broader range of courses, SMEs would be able to make more effective use of the resources and realise increased efficiency savings.

Discussion and lessons learned

We believe that the work on this platform demonstrates a proof of concept for the model proposed in upskilling and reskilling engineers for current and future roles across a range of sectors. In fact, as part of its Advanced Manufacturing Plan, the UK Government has announced a scaled-up Upskilling and Reskilling programme, which will hopefully build on the lessons learned from this pilot.

The main lessons learned from this project were:

• SMEs require access to a broader range of courses.
• To be financially viable the platform needs to be sector agnostic, serving large, medium and small employers from a range of sectors.
• The platform should collect more data, minimising the number of requests to employers and training providers to provide it.
• The need to support wider SME uptake by engaging with more partners during the project lifecycle.

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