How to fix the Energy Skills Passport

The expansion of the UK’s renewable energy sectors, particularly offshore wind in Scotland, will be core to Andy Burnham’s vision of reindustrialising the UK and are at the heart of the UK and Scottish government’s existing industrial strategies. 

But while both governments promise to scale up those industries, oil and gas workers who want to transition into existing clean energy today have been left in limbo. 

This is because a central tool that is designed to bridge the gap between offshore oil and gas and renewable energy jobs — the Energy Skills Passport — is falling far short of what workers need. 

Same skills; different qualifications 

"They're shooting themselves in the foot because a lot of people like me won't do the course — so they're making it quite difficult for people like me to transition across."

P. is an offshore medic with the skills to work in renewables and oil. Despite a significant overlap in those skills, he currently needs two sets of qualifications which cost thousands of pounds to maintain.

He is not alone. Research shows that workers across the offshore energy sector face serious barriers to moving between industries, and that unemployed and self-employed contractors, like P., bear the highest costs. This is because the  oil and gas and offshore wind industries use separate standards bodies whose qualifications don't fully recognise each other. While progress is being made in aligning these standards, the process is slow. 

The Energy Skills Passport (ESP) was intended to help solve this problem. The tool was backed by £3.7 million from the Scottish Government's Just Transition Fund and supported by the UK Government. 

The former project lead for the ESP, a global skills body called the Offshore Petroleum Industry Training Organization (OPITO), promised that the passport would "fundamentally transform how the offshore energy workforce transitions and works between sectors". 

Building on the commitments in the  2021 North Sea Transition Deal,¹ the tool would ensure "the duplication of training requirements is minimised, reducing cost in terms of finance and time, for the worker and the employer" — and that workers would "stop repeating training unnecessarily." It was due by the end of 2023. A "beta" version arrived eighteen months late.

Fewer than 1% of offshore workers have used the skills passport 

New FOI data reveals that between January 2025 and March 2026, just 688 workers had created profiles on the platform —  fewer than 0.6% of the 115,000 workers it was built to serve.² 

This can be partly explained by how little it currently offers workers. As launched, it is a digital profile system: workers log their qualifications and are shown what additional training certain roles require. It does not recognise existing qualifications as equivalent to new ones — meaning it cannot reduce the duplication of training costs it was designed to solve. 

What it offers instead is a directory, or “skills database”.  The platform's design compounds this. Its predefined dropdown menus were built around a narrow set of job categories that do not reflect the breadth of what offshore workers actually do.

In February 2026, we sat with D., a mechanical engineer with five years of offshore experience, as he attempted to map his qualifications. Some of his specific skill areas were not listed and as a result he was forced to select generic "engineering" tags that failed to capture his expertise. His profile generated matches for roles in facilities management and general maintenance, both nowhere close to his actual skill set or career aspirations. As currently built, the passport cannot even accurately describe what many offshore workers do.

A June 2025 Skills England assessment published by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) describes the passport as a tool that "recognises existing skills and qualifications across industries." But it currently falls short of that. 

Why it failed

Documents released under Environmental Information Regulations reveal how predictable these challenges have been. 

Scottish Government records from mid-2023 show officials were aware that parts of the wind sector were resisting alignment and the project's governing group had not met for months. Ministers were warned additional funding would be needed. When a minister met OPITO in February 2024 and expressed disappointment, the response was to propose an "iterative" launch. 

The UK Government joined as an official project partner in October 2024, promising stakeholder convening and project management support. Further development has since stalled with no public timeline for the fuller version originally promised.

Qualification alignment can be genuinely challenging. Oil and gas companies can be reluctant to facilitate worker exits, there can be legitimate disputes about differing safety standards between sectors, and years of political instability has prevented coordination across devolved skills policy. But these were known obstacles, not surprises.

Asking industry bodies with commercial interests in training revenue to self-organise and voluntarily reduce training requirements was always optimistic. The passport needed strong government involvement from the start or independent governance. It had neither.

Led by industry bodies with conflicting commercial interests, underfunded relative to the scale of the problem, and handled at arm's length by the Scottish government, the passport was never given the conditions it needed to succeed.

What needs to change

Scottish Labour and Conservative manifestos have both promised changes and expansion of the passport to additional sectors. And two of the passport leads, OEUK and RenewableUK, are planning to expand the passport's coverage into nuclear and electricity networks. There is coherence to going beyond offshore wind as the UK's broader Industrial Strategy can benefit from the skilled workers the passport was built to support.³ 

But the case for reform or the passport’s potential is not really the issue. Delivery is. To fix this two things need to happen.

1. Deliver qualification recognition

The core promise of the passport was the formal recognition of qualifications workers already held, so that a worker moving from oil and gas to offshore wind does not pay twice for training covering skills they already have. That promise has not been delivered. 

OPITO and the Global Wind Organisation (GWO) have not reached the agreement required to make it work. Since the UK Government joined as a delivery partner in October 2024, the passport appears no closer to full delivery.

The Scottish and UK governments have leverage. If the standards bodies cannot reach agreement, the Fair Work Charter, North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) Stewardship Guidance, and clean energy contract conditions all offer routes to encourage participation. 

If progress remains stalled, oversight should pass to a public body with no financial stake in training volumes. The current arrangement, in which bodies with commercial interests in training revenue are asked to voluntarily reduce those revenues, was always unlikely to succeed. 

Finally, the UK should also use its seat at the North Seas Energy Cooperation (NSEC) to put workforce transition on the agenda. The 2022 Memorandum of Understanding between the UK and NSEC participants covers offshore grid development and hybrid projects — but says nothing about the workforce that will build and operate them. A common push on skills recognition across North Sea nations would do more than any national initiative alone.

2. Clearly integrate the passport into a broader transition offer

The passport currently exists as a standalone tool. The new North Sea Jobs Service and further training offers must continue to be clearly embedded into wider transition planning. 

The passport is only useful if a worker can afford to act on it. A web-tool showing which courses a role requires means nothing to a self-employed contractor who cannot absorb the fees, lost earnings and travel that retraining demands. 

We have previously proposed integrating training delivery into the Clean Industry Bonus, with developers drawing bonus funding required to cover course fees and the wrap-around support — travel, subsistence, living costs — that makes retraining possible in practice.

The UK Government's North Sea Future Plan, with its new North Sea Jobs Service offering end-to-end transition support is a welcome step towards integration. But there are two potential challenges.  

The Jobs Service is designed to reach 5,000–10,000 workers a year. When set against the 115,000 people the passport was built to serve, that is a fraction of the workforce, and only meaningful if those it does reach actually move. And like the passport before it, the Service is to be delivered "closely with industry" and through a contractor — the main danger is that the same arm's-length model that left the passport stalled is repeated.

Broadening the passport beyond offshore wind makes sense for workers whose skills are needed across the whole clean energy build-out. But expansion only delivers wider benefits if it is coordinated. It is currently unclear how opportunities across sectors will be made visible, sequenced and planned, or how local authorities, combined authorities and employers are meant to plan around them.

All this work needs to span the devolution divide so the Office for Clean Energy Job must work in genuine lockstep with Skills Development Scotland and the NSTA. The Energy Independence Bill should ensure that the relevant organisations have the remits and purposes and powers to deliver this.

Conclusion

After years of advocacy from workers, unions and campaigners, the UK and Scottish Governments have finally delivered a version of an offshore training passport. But as it stands it falls short, failing to reach the workers it was built for — both because what it offers is so limited and because the Government has yet to build the broader transition offer around it.

The gap between intent and delivery is clear in the minutes of the North Sea Future Board, which brings ministers, unions, developers and industry bodies around one table. Across its first two meetings in early 2026, the recurring themes were coordination and credible data. Members acknowledged that existing workers risk being left behind - all issues raised 5 years ago as part of the North Sea Transition Deal process that led to the passport in the first place.

The governments have not been indifferent. But the passport shows how wide the gap between transition theory and practice can be — and how often fundamental parts of the North Sea transition are left to industry, with poor results for the workforce and the communities that depend on it. The levers to do better exist. Whether the government will use them with the seriousness the transition requires remains to be seen.

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