The chair of ADEPT's National Traffic Managers forum has said the highways sector needs to develop a ‘pipeline of people' as he discussed the skills gap in advance of the fourth National Traffic Managers' Conference in Birmingham next month.
Mark Corbin (pictured), who is also the director of Network Resilience at the Transport for West Midlands (TfWM), told Highways that the theme for the conference on 20 October would be ‘lifting the lid on skills’, including an interactive problem-solving session with youngsters.
A cohort of young people from the TfWM’s youth forum will be taking part on the day to help give a younger perspective on the sector and how this relates to pathways into work.
Mr Corbin said: ‘The final session is going to be about future technical leaders in practice – so we set them a challenge. We are going to have a design workshop so they can start to put their thinking behind a particular challenge we set them into practice and work with traffic managers across the room on resolving that.’
Outlining the focus of the wider conference programme, he said: ‘We are looking at why we have found it so difficult to recruit, retain and even retrain talent. If you are looking around thinking who will replace me when I am gone then you need to be at this conference. We can really try to do more to encourage a pipeline of people. We need a pipeline of people.'
The conference will showcase 'what we are doing in the West Midlands through our Transport Skills Academy and also look wider and see what other sectors are doing to build and sustain diverse workforces,' he added.
Top names on the programme include West Midlands mayor Andy Street and Anthony Ferguson, deputy director for traffic and technology at the Department for Transport.
Senior BBC boss Philip Robinson will be providing outside analysis on ‘building a diverse sector and encouraging diverse leaders’.
Fresh from his success as the Commonwealth Games’ route network deputy manager, TfWM’s Dwaine Taylor will recount some of his own career stories from having started as a young team member himself to helping lead the transport on perhaps the biggest event Birmingham has ever seen.
Discussing the success of the games, Mr Corbin said: ‘Events like the Commonwealth Games are critical for the social and economic cohesion of a region like the West Midlands.
What makes events like this successful from our perspective is the people and organisations that you don’t even see. They just sit behind the scenes doing a lot of work within our Regional Transport Co-ordination Centre. We have brought together a lot of partners around a single objective – let’s deliver these games successfully and make sure that transport is not the story.
‘When you take a step back and see people having a great time and it’s a great showcase on TV and social media and people talk about whether we could host Olympics and bigger events, you know that you are making a difference to the way people feel about the place they live in.’
Discussing the wider traffic management landscape, Mr Corbin argued for a new understanding of long-term funding aspirations, particularly around fast-paced technological change.
‘You can’t take the same attitudes of investment in an analogue system as you do in a rapidly changing digital system,’ he said.
‘The highways sector makes a lot of noise around digitalisation but we have a terrible legacy with analogue infrastructure. It is important we understand what our long-term strategies and investment plans need to be so we can work together with the Government and really start addressing how we are actually going to make these networks more efficient for our communities and businesses.’
You can find out more and sign up to the National Traffic Managers' Conference here.
