“Working with The Marketing Pod has been invaluable to achieving success in this campaign (The Talent Track: Addressing rail's skills shortage). From the ideas stage at the very start, to delivery and onwards. The feedback we have received has ranged from incredibly positive to defensive of the situation. It’s made us realise what kind of impact the campaign has had. We believe it has helped raise attention, pushing people to talk about solving the skills gap again, which we consider a huge success.”
CWE
Addressing Rail's Skills Shortage
CWE Ltd is based in Crowle and provides specialist, high-quality rail engineering solutions. It offers the UK’s only independent buffer and legacy coupler overhaul service, as well as refurbishment, machining, fabrication, and overall lifecycle management services.
The brief
CWE decided it was time to take action on the looming skills gap in the rail industry, and wanted to be the ones to do it.
Led by Managing Director, Nick Andrew, CWE’s senior management team all joined the industry as apprentices – so training young engineers is something embedded into the company’s DNA. The company has its own “Rising stars of CWE” apprenticeship scheme, and has been a keen advocate of investing in the engineering talent of tomorrow, regularly volunteering senior management time at local colleges and careers fairs.
This focus led to the company voicing its concerns about the results of a City & Guilds and National Skills Academy for Rail (NSAR) report from 2019, which showed up to 120,000 additional people would be needed to work in the industry by 2030. Findings also revealed an ageing workforce, a diversity problem, and a drop in EU workers in the sector.
By 2022, CWE was growing frustrated that not much progress had been made to address these issues. As a consequence, the company called upon The Marketing Pod (TMP) to help develop a campaign to highlight the sector’s skills shortage, identify clear calls to action, and position CWE as a thought leader and true champion of careers in the rail industry.
Our approach
Our approach:
Working together, TMP and CWE brought together leading experts from academia and the rail industry. We organised a roundtable discussion on the barriers to rail as a career choice and how to overcome the challenges, and secured respected rail journalist Nigel Worsworth of Rail Business Daily as facilitator. Roundtable participants included:
- Nick Andrew, Managing Director, CWE
- John Hall, Managing Director, Davis Wagon Services
- Christine Fernandes, Business Development, CAF and Chair of Women in Rail
- Will Rogers, Managing Director, East Midlands Railway
- Alec Gillham, Strategic Development Manager, National College for Advanced Transport and Infrastructure (NCATI)
- Barry Smith, Head of Assessment and Skills, National Skills Academy for Rail (NSAR)
Hosted at NCATI’s Doncaster campus, the debate covered areas including rail’s public image, access to apprenticeships, attracting talent and encouraging greater diversity. From the discussions, TMP produced a comprehensive report - Keeping Talent on Track: Addressing the skills shortage in the rail sector - where seven clear actions were identified. We also secured a commentary from Tan Dhesi MP, the Shadow Minister for Railways, to add to the report.
We then created a blog, infographic and social posts, and used owned and earned channels to spread the word about the report. Our PR teams also produced a news release for the campaign.
To make the campaign as topical as possible, we timed the campaign to launch during National Apprenticeship Week 2023, which ran from 6-12 February.
The results
The campaign grabbed the attention of influential trade bodies such as Rail Forum and Rail Freight Group, who have now set up dedicated skills forums to spearhead change in the industry.
Nick Andrew has also been invited to be part of an exclusive group to decide the future of NCAT, and the campaign has launched an on-going thought leadership programme for CWE.
The campaign also achieved coverage in core publications for the rail sector, reaching 200,000+ of our target audience, including:
- Rail Forum
- Rail Business Daily
- Professional Engineering Magazine
- Rail Professional Magazine
Social media activity on CWE’s LinkedIn page also resulted in 8,591 total impressions. The ten launch/post-launch posts aimed at engaging the rail community also received 205 clicks, 17 shares and eight comments.
8,591 total impressions
205
clicks
17
17 Shares and 8 comments
