Positioning Paper on Meriting Process Launched

In early 2024, GWO's Merit workstream began to review and build capacity in an area key to smoothing the entry of talent into careers in wind. From the starting point of maintaining the existing, large cohort meriting (undertaken by GWO’s members) the new processes will bring meriting to a new wider audience. The ambition here is to facilitate GWO’s and the Global Wind Energy Council’s (GWEC) published labour force forecasts for the next three years that predict over 574,000 technicians will be required by 2027, including almost 43% of these being new talent to the industry. This challenge can only be met by supporting and expanding competencies in the GWO community in new ways.

A key element of this is to facilitate transitioning workers. Often these are from, so-called, sunset industries and the military. Government funded schemes such as the UK’s ELCAS, the EU’s T-shore and many others are already supporting larger coherent cohorts with GWO certified training, but additional, flexible meriting routes are still not available widely enough.

“Accessibility and flexibility are watchwords for this workstream. Our target groups are current and future wind technicians looking to have their specific combination of non-GWO ‘legacy’ training merited. As individuals or in small groups, these may be either entirely new to wind, or already have some GWO training but additional non-GWO qualifications and educations from other competencies systems. Our new Positioning Paper gives more detail of our early stage proposals. Please read it and, if you have time, give us your views and experiences of meriting.”

Christopher Furlan, GWO Head of Training Quality

GWO’s Merit Positioning Paper describes how the potential merit system is intended to be applicable globally and be legacy training agnostic to allow the widest range of new entrants to transition into careers in wind. There is also a presumption that GWO’s Entry Level Framework is the model for entry level competencies. The Entry Level Framework (available on globalwindsafety.org). contains a variety of safety and technical standards for training.

At this stage, GWO would like to hear opinions on the Positioning Paper, the project’s terms of reference, assumptions and context. GWO will be posting regular updates on the project and announcing further consultation in due course. To capture opinions on the Positioning Paper GWO has created a Survey Monkey. This will be open to respondents until 14th April 2024 

Read the Meriting Positioning Paper and add your thoughts via an online survey (to 14 April 2024, only) here