The World of Skills

Overview

The performance of Cogent sector affects everyone in the UK. We depend on it for our energy, our healthcare needs and the chemicals and polymers in the products we all use every day.

Maintaining and growing a world-leading position is dependent upon a highly skilled and dynamic workforce to deal with the challenges of tougher global competition and rapidly changing technology.

As this section will show, the pace of change means that the need for ongoing training and development is central. It’s a big challenge and one which needs a partnership approach bringing all parties to the table.

National and International Context

Cogent sector industries add value through skills-intensive products that support the infrastructure of modern society itself - energy, health, transport and materials. But the intellectual property, the generation of new scientific knowledge and, crucially, the skills and innovation to convert this to tomorrow’s solutions to today’s problems, are the core assets that will sustain these UK industries on a global platform.

The World is our Business and our Legacy

If ever there was a period in economic history when the finite supply of global resources was most acutely felt, it is today. We have reached a stage when the advances of science, digital communications, transport and engineering have raised the interdependence of humans in all parts of the globe. In arriving at this juncture, the pace of economic and social advance has been driven, in the more advanced economies, by coupling success through consumption with socialisation through regulation. But we will threaten the very sustainability of our industries and our society if we have consumption without the investment to make ourselves more efficient, innovative, flexible, self-sufficient, responsible, and indeed, more skilled.

All Roads lead to Science

From oil to pharmaceuticals, all of the sectors within the Cogent footprint are concerned with using science to add value. Through science and engineering we have unlocked value and functional sophistication from carbon in its various forms, and from non-carbon-based material in the case of the Nuclear sector. From chemical sources we have created pharmaceutical and biotechnological advances with valuable practical applications. It is the in-common skills around chemical transformation, separation science, molecular processing and physical containment that link the Cogent footprint.

Oil connects a significant part of the sector – as it connects a significant part of the world economy – primarily because we are intensively dependent on it both as a source of energy and as a raw material. Through oil, the carbon economy has shaped our civilisation. The majority of oil, 70%, is used for energy and energy fuels (petrochemicals); half of the rest is converted to chemicals, plastics and pharmaceuticals. The knowledge of those working in the Cogent sector will be vital to meeting the world’s challenges relating to carbon, to ensure the future sustainability of our economy.

The Cogent Carbon Value Chain


Thus, the place for knowledge without skill is on the leaves of the books in which it is written. In contrast, it is knowledge with skilled application and transfer to commercial advantage and wealth creation that has earned the science-using industries in the Cogent sector their strategic platform.