About

Who we are and what we do

Cogent is the expert, employer-led Sector Skills Council delivering strategic solutions to the skills needs of the chemicals, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, nuclear, polymer and petroleum industries.

We are licensed by the Government to provide employers in our sector with the opportunity for coherent leadership and strategic action to meet their skills needs. With the backing of employers, we now present a clear and powerful voice, enabling sector employers to influence Government policy development and shape the outputs of training and education providers all around the UK.

Our key national objectives are to:

  • Reduce the sector’s skills gaps and shortages and anticipate future needs in the Cogent industries.
  • Improve productivity and business performance through specific strategic actions, based on our analysis of sectoral priorities.
  • Increase opportunities to develop the productivity of the sector’s workforce.
  • Improve learning supply, including the development of apprenticeships, higher education and of national occupational standards.
Sector Skills Agreement Process

As part of our planning process, we have undertaken in-depth research and analysis to find out what skills employers need their workforce to have in order to remain competitive and how these skills should best be supplied.

The result was the Cogent Sector Skills Agreement (SSA), an extensively brokered deal between employers, employees, trade unions, training providers and the Government. Through the underpinning research, employers have set out their current and future workforce and skills requirements. In return, the relevant agencies are funding and delivering training and qualifications tailored to this need.

Skills Needs

Cogent continues to examine the key drivers for change and the implications for skills and employment. Key factors for the sector include global competition, advancing technology, pressure on resources, and ever-higher expectations around health, safety and the environment. The result is that skills and working practices are changing quickly right across the footprint for new entrants and the existing workforce – where changes in working methods, materials and equipment are all demanding higher level skills.

The statistics do highlight a pressing need for the upskilling of two crucial populations – the managers and the operators – and the gap between skills required and qualifications held prevails throughout the Cogent industries.

Strategic Actions

To deliver the ambitious vision of the SSA, five key programmes for the sector are now being rolled out, each one designed to address the top issues arising from the research:

Cogent Career Pathways: A unique and lively web-based careers information advice and guidance centre with information on career progression, jobs, salaries and training.

Cogent Apprentices: An up-to-date apprenticeship framework to meet the needs of the operating companies in the sector, with the flexibility to meet the specific needs of individual industries. It addresses the unique operations and process management in the highly-regulated Cogent industries.

Upskill: A central programme focusing on addressing the skills gaps identified through the SSA. Upskill is providing the mechanism to take individuals from their current skill level to the Cogent Industry standard, via a modular approach, including through:

  • Modular Qualifications
  • Approval System for Employer Training (ASET)
  • Funding (Sector Compact)
  • Passports Information Technology Platform /Training Database

Competence Assurance: A universal competence assurance framework enabling companies to assess their management of risk, to benchmark competence standards against other organisations and to promote best practice internally. It represents a total systems check to reveal what companies do not know about their own procedures and systems. Uniquely, it provides a confidential self-examination of organisation-wide competence without any third-party involvement, allowing the company, rather than the regulator, to identify areas of weakness to be addressed.

The Skills Passport: A web-based initiative that can be tailored to meet the needs of the nuclear and the process industries. It uses a secure IT system to provide employees and contractors with a portable online record of all their industry-specific training and qualifications, allowing them to demonstrate that they have the skills fit for a worldclass industry.

Skills Academies

Cogent is in the unique position of having three employer-led Academies in our sector footprint. In late 2007, we received Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills approval for the National Skills Academies for the Nuclear and the Process Industries.

Around the same time, OPITO, The Oil and Gas Skills Academy, was announced by Scotland’s First Minister. This Academy was formed around the existing entity OPITO, but with a broader and very challenging agenda to address the skill shortage issues facing the offshore industry.

The Academies, with the support of employers, are now delivering the training to the skills standard for the industry, while ensuring that there is the capacity and capability to deliver the skills needed into the future. Their essential job is to build on existing good provision around the UK, working with current providers to raise the standards and to ensure they are responding to employer demand. They work through a variety of models: for example, existing training centres, Further Education colleges, universities, employer sites, or new purpose-built facilities, depending on what is needed for each region.

The National Skills Academy for Nuclear

The National Skills Academy for Nuclear is assisting employers in tackling the current and future skills challenges facing the industry, not just in relation to the Government’s £65bn clean-up programme, but also for waste management, defence, fuel processing and enrichment and power production, to ensure the sector has the skills necessary for the recently announced new build.

The Academy is playing a transformational role for the sector. Using the Nuclear Credit Framework developed in partnership with Cogent, it is developing a standardised and coordinated approach to education, training and skills development in the nuclear sector.

The National Skills Academy Process Industries

The National Skills Academy Process Industries represents a much-needed centre of excellence for employers in learning, training and education. Above all it is ensuring the next generation of highly trained, highly motivated employees, needed to sustain and grow these strategically important industries.

The Academy’s central hub at the University of Teesside’s Innovation Centre is steering the leadership and accreditation activities, and a network of public and private training centres around the UK is set to deliver the training.

OPITO the Oil and Gas Academy

During 2007, the Oil and Gas Industry’s leaders realised their vision to create a single industry Academy owned, directed and funded by the industry to provide employers with a pivotal link between demands of the business and the supply of high quality learning provision.

Cogent will remain the Sector Skills Council for the Oil and Gas industry, as well as retaining a seat on the Board of OPITO. In this way, OPITO and Cogent retain a close working relationship, similar to those with the other two Skills Academies in its footprint.

Qualifications Reform

Cogent serves a diverse industry sector bound together by a number of common skills requirements, but above all it is a sector that needs focused and effective Continuing

Professional Development for its employees at every level. Vital for the sector is Cogent’s work to restructure and rationalise existing qualifications into smaller, themed groups of units, targeted at specific training needs. Linked to this will be the accreditation of employer training which meets the standard – another major breakthrough for employers.

This process is forming new, modular qualifications which will ensure that people are trained to world-class standards at a pace that suits them and their employer. Cogent and its awarding bodies are working to ensure these new qualifications are submitted for approval as quickly as possible to meet priority skills needs – while Cogent and the Skills Academies are making sure that they are easily accessible by employers.