No matter where you go in the world, you’ll meet someone who honed their craft in Aberdeen. Our skills pool is special and unique, and underutilised. The North Sea has been a training ground enabling the global development of oil and gas. It bred the most competent workforce in energy you’ll find anywhere.
It took 60 years, and some devastating lessons, to build this world-class, safety-critical workforce. Why keep it restricted to one sector?
I can’t be the only person both excited and frustrated by this opportunity? Imagine what we could achieve if experience could move more easily.
We have been discussing the barriers for years. Credit is due to those in oil and gas and wind who have tried to address them. The Energy Skills Passport is welcome progress, but failed to capture industry and worker imagination: only 688 users, fewer than 0.6% of the total target workforce, had registered by March 2026.
The cyclical nature of oil and gas means redundancies will always be part of the picture, yet the skills of the people affected need not be lost with them. If their competence were recognised elsewhere, they could move into sectors like construction, renewables or defence and remain available when demand returns.
Many of those industries have genuine skills gaps. But more pressingly, they have a transfer of competence gap. It’s hard to justify a skills shortage when experienced people are standing on the other side of a line drawn by paperwork. The problem isn’t a lack of ability, it’s that the proof doesn’t travel.
What’s needed now is to extend these efforts, recognising competence across more industries. True competence mobility means employers can fill skills gaps with experienced people, and those people can be confident that their expertise will be recognised.
Our region is currently hosting some of the most significant energy infrastructure investment seen in a generation. My hometown, Peterhead, has gladly welcomed highly skilled workers from Europe and the UK who have come to support these projects. That’s brilliant, but what opportunities have local people with years of relevant experience missed through having the ‘wrong certifications’?
Why must each industry build its own workforce? Dare I ask out loud, is there an arrogance to each industry thinking it’s truly unique, or just a lack of insight and understanding? Industry and safety requirements should signpost a pathway, not create a barrier.
Where competence can be demonstrated, we should recognise it and target the gaps. Different hazards, equipment and operations demand proper preparation. Repeating equivalent learning simply to gain another accepted ticket deserves scrutiny.
Imagine moving from offshore into infrastructure, gaining experience, then into renewables or back into oil and gas. Employers gain a broader workforce; people gain choices and stronger careers; talent stays available.
ASCO is designing cross-sector pathways, combining operational experience, workforce solutions’ recruitment insight and ASCO's lifting, training and assessment expertise. Serving energy and infrastructure industries, we see the demand and capability. We’re taking steps to connect them.
To make this a reality, employer acceptance is essential. We’re working to ensure our lifting training and competence assessment meet each relevant industry’s requirements, creating routes without waiting for collaboration challenges to be resolved.
Experience takes years to build, but targeted competence assessment can help an experienced person cross into a new sector much sooner. And the sooner we act, the larger the workforce available tomorrow.
If talent could move as readily as demand, there’s no telling what our industries could achieve together, and at ASCO we intend to find out.
Claire's opinion piece features in the November 2026 edition of Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce Business Bulletin.