Established by Cogent Skills and the National  Composites Centre in 2023, the HSA brings together over 50 organisations from across the four nations of the UK – including industry, academia, government and skills bodies – to address the skills gaps and promote innovation.

The UK government sees hydrogen as critical in achieving its net-zero ambitions by 2050 – and a skilled workforce is absolute crucial in delivering this. The HSA’s recent workforce assessment found around 29,000 direct jobs will be needed across the hydrogen economy by 2030 – a huge increase from the current 1,600 jobs.

Over its first year, the  HSA has taken meaningful steps towards delivering the hydrogen workforce of the future by:

• Assessing and projecting future skills needs, through initiatives like workforce foresighting.
• Creating a guide to the knowledge, skills and behaviours required by roles across the hydrogen economy, ensuring clarity and direction for training programmes.
• Collecting and sharing information and data on hydrogen skills from research and skills communities to support stakeholders.
• Enabling the creation of training programmes and frameworks across the skills value chain, from basic awareness to specialised roles. Acting as a single voice into government to shape skills policy and address skills challenges to support the growth of the hydrogen economy.

Later this year, the HSA will work to build on these foundations with the delivery of a UK Hydrogen Skills Strategy – a comprehensive document to address workforce needs and the development of crucial skills for the hydrogen economy.

This will sit alongside greater engagement and collaboration between the HSA employers across industry, further workforce foresighting work and other initiatives.

A key piece of work will be the creation of a dynamic workforce demand model – this will help industry stay ahead of the curve with changing skills needs as the rapidly-changing hydrogen sector continues to evolve.

Finally, all of this work will support the development of a pilot Hydrogen Skills Academy, which will coordinate the development and delivery of vital skills across the hydrogen value chain.

Cogent Skills’ Head of Low Carbon Skills, Jude Knight, said

The Hydrogen Skills Alliance has achieved some really significant things in its first twelve months, which is a credit to the hard work of all members in supporting industry to increase the delivery of key hydrogen skills.

Hydrogen has enormous potential to both grow our economy and help deliver net zero – and our forthcoming Hydrogen Skills Strategy will help turbocharge this process over the coming years.

To find out more about the HSA’s achievements in its first year and its ambitions for the next twelve months, click here.