Tomorrow's water skills - how to tackle the silver tsunami

Water resilience balances how much water we have in the environment against how much water we use. Climate change and population growth are already reshaping that balance. But do we have the right people with the right skills to make water more resilient as these pressures grow? Joe Sanders and Matt Ascott report

As climate change, urbanisation and population growth challenge the world’s water resilience, there is growing concern in the UK water industry about finding and keeping the right people and the right skills to protect and manage future supply.

Recent studies by the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board (ECITB) show that 48 per cent of the water-engineering workforce will retire in the next 20 years. The challenge is so acute that people in our industry have started to talk about a silver tsunami.

To add to the challenge, fewer than 40 per cent of engineering graduates join the engineering professions when they graduate. And only 0.23 per cent of university leavers joined the water sector. Diversity is a problem, too: just 13 per cent of the workforce is female and just 4 per cent say they come from minoritised ethnic backgrounds, against a UK average of 12 per cent.

The Geological Society’s Hydrogeological Group is trying to establish equivalent figures for this segment of the industry. We expect the results to look very similar.

COVID has also had a short-term impact as well. Like other employers worldwide, many firms in the industry reduced or froze graduate hiring for two years.

Fall-out from the pandemic includes furlough programmes, hiring freezes and, in some cases, mass redundancies. That has created short-term gaps in experience in key areas of the industry – something impossible to avoid during the pandemic that has only compounded pressures on skills.

Recent news headlines about the industry also create a new barrier to new talent. Think failed leakage targets, drought, pollution and public outrage about high dividends to shareholders. How appealing is it to young people to join our industry when stories like these create negative perceptions?

Pressure on water-sector skills and on the workforce could present as big a challenge for resilience as balancing water supply and demand. We predict impacts from skills shortages that could include:

• A lack of engineering skills that could reduce innovation, due to having fewer resources to support implement new approaches. This will be further complicated by engineers having to maintain the UK’s ageing infrastructure
• Having fewer senior industry personnel means a smaller pool of mentors to support newer employees. That could be a barrier to early-career professionals getting chartered. It could also affect career progression and staff retention rates and discourage additional new entrants
• Longer-term, there will be fewer people to deliver the work that resilience demands. That will increase workloads for the staff we have and, in simple terms of supply and demand, it will increase the cost of these services to an industry already feeling its budgets squeezed.

Bridging the gap

So what are CIWEM and the wider industry doing now? Firms across the industry are accelerating their graduate schemes to build new and diverse workforces. The industry is also creating more apprenticeships, to draw in people from non-traditional backgrounds – a trend we are seeing across both engineering and hydrological sciences.

CIWEM is supporting this expansion into different areas of academia, having developed the TechCIWEM qualification. It’s a great initiative to offer guidance and support to people at the early stages of their career.

The last year’s return to face-to-face conferences has reopened opportunities to network and meet likeminded people in the industry. The networks we build at these types of events create external support structures that carry you through your entire career.

It is uplifting to witness so many people working towards the same goal, to protect water, the environment and future resources. It provides insight into future opportunities and creates a great atmosphere to learn and develop.

There is also more focus, now, on letting technical people use their skills rather than pushing them into managing projects or work teams. Pushing people with technical backgrounds into project management or administration made many people disenchanted at work, prompting many to leave the industry altogether.

Returning to focus on technical skills – accepting that some assignments are so complex that they need dedicated project-management skills to deliver effectively and efficiently – frees specialists to concentrate on projects’ technical problems.

However, these are all relatively short-term, immediate actions. What can we do in the future to make the water sector more resilient?

One challenge the industry has always faced is that very few of us leave school thinking that we want to work in the water or water-resources sectors. Many of us in the industry were drawn in by its mix of environmental, engineering, sustainability and public service, having discovered these only through broader study or having come to water later in life.

It’s a trend reflected in the number of university leavers that join the industry. When the Water Resources Panel discussed this topic recently, several of us noted how many roles require specialist secondary degrees – because more general first degrees fail to address the knowledge and skills our industry needs.

Others pointed out that water sector doesn’t exactly have a high profile on graduate-recruitment days.

Landing new talent

So do we attract these students earlier? One answer is to work with the likes of Defra and the Department of Education to give a higher priority on primary and secondary-school curricula to water resources and to environmental sciences more generally. This should encourage more people to consider the water sector as a career before they leave school.

We also need to teach students the right skills and knowledge at university. Many CIWEM members sit on universities’ science-advisory boards or equivalent. Do we need more input to shape what our future engineers and hydrogeologists learn as undergraduates, creating a wider pool of people with the right qualifications and skills to fill our vacancies?

Finally, are we creating the right entry routes into the industry? The vast majority of engineering students enter the industry through a graduate scheme, joining either a water company or one of the consultancies.

These are often designed to help new graduates to understand the industry they are entering, moving them around every few months to understand different parts of the business. This is great to gain a good understanding of how the industry works – but does it lead to more generalists?

We often hear talk at recruitment events about how graduates are “the managers of the future”. We hear far less talk about helping them to become the technical leaders and specialists of the future.

It’s established practice in hydrology, where graduates tend to join as specialists, bypassing these more general schemes. Perhaps we need to challenge these thought process, and to explore new routes into our industry – to ensure that these types of schemes create future leaders in the true sense of the word.

This is not an exhaustive list of suggestions about how we tackle our industry’s future skills shortages. But it highlights the part all of us will need to play, to build and secure our future water resources.

This is not an exhaustive list by any stretch of the imagination, but it does show that we all have our part to play to ensure more resilient water resources in future.

We will do this in the short and medium term by delivering, to the best of our ability, our current roles day to day. But we must also become mentors, teachers, sponsors and disruptors of water and wastewater-industry norms. Taking on new approaches will be critical, to navigate our industry’s silver tsunami and to keep our long-term water resilience in safe hands.

Joe Sanders is a technical director at RPS. Matt Ascott is a hydrogeologist at British Geological Survey

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