Knowledge exchange will be vital for upskilling the chemistry workforce

The Royal Society of Chemistry’s Future Workforce and Educational Pathways report makes 13 recommendations for how to ensure the UK’s chemical industry’s workforce has the skills it needs to tackle societal challenges. Many of these focus on educating and training the next generation of chemical scientists, with suggestions to review school and university curricula to make sure they provide students with the relevant chemistry and transferable skills.

However, the recommendation I’m particularly pleased to see is the call on policymakers to do more to incentivise upskilling and retraining existing workers.

Training employees is not as easy as deciding what new skills they need. A survey of technicians and focus groups of employers and researchers carried out as part of the report all revealed that a major barrier to training was lack of time. This mirrors findings from the RSC’s 2023 Pay and Reward report, in which nearly half of respondents cited lack of time as the biggest challenge to their professional development.

When we think about making the time for training and development, we tend to concentrate on the time spent on doing a learning activity – the length of the course, or the hours spent reviewing content. However, for training to be effective we also need to have the opportunity to apply what we’ve learnt. I once completed a time management course that left me feeling genuinely inspired – but the next day I went on holiday. In the chaos of catching up once I got back, I had no time to try out the suggestions from the course. With no formal requirement to follow up on the training, I eventually largely forgot about them.

Across the divide

I like the strategy for crosstraining described by one chemical manufacturer quoted in the Future Workforce report. Their employees work on projects outside their main expertise to gain experience of working with different chemistries. The employee is immediately applying the new skills they’re learning, so they’re more likely to stick; the other members of team they join deepen their knowledge through teaching someone else; and the employer is developing the means to fill skills gaps.

This avoids the trap of viewing training as a separate activity that you have to take time out work to do. There is still an initial time cost of course, but one likely to be similar to the time needed to get a new employee up to speed. Which is a fair cost to pay, especially if you end up reducing turnover as existing employees feel more satisfied with the personal development opportunities available.

There are many ways policymakers can incentivise this approach to training, and the Future Workforce report doesn’t dictate how that should be done. I’d like to see support for more practical knowledge exchange activities – ideally, interdisciplinary ones that go beyond the chemical sector. By sending chemical scientists into other industries to learn how to support their sustainability, health and economic goals, we can upskill our workforce while also demonstrating how central chemistry is to wider society.