North Sea Jobs Service: How to Transform an Ambitious Promise on Paper into Reality

The UK Government has pledged to deliver “a world-leading national programme offering end-to-end career transition support for oil and gas workers looking to move into secure jobs in growing industries”.

With procurement expected in April 2026 and service launch in September 2026, this is the moment to get the design for the North Sea Jobs Service (NSJS) right. While the Government’s Clean Energy Mission and North Sea Future Plan represent a broader set of actions to support affected communities and regional economies, this briefing focuses specifically on the design of the NSJS as the worker-facing element of that strategy. It sets out what “world-leading” actually requires: five principles for a service that goes well beyond careers advisory and actively recruits workers into good quality alternative jobs. 

In brief

• Transition schemes are not new - countries such as Spain and Germany have secured agreements to support workers in their transition away from coal.

• In the UK, the reality of transition initiatives is often falling behind ambitious promises on paper.

• The NSJS can become “world-leading” if the Government bridges this gap. 

• Worker demand is high - as demonstrated by almost 1000 applications to the Oil and Gas Transition Training Fund (TTF) - but the Government must now meet that demand with genuine pathways into employment.

• To do so, it must follow five design principles to ensure effective coordination, employer and worker participation, detailed skill mapping and skill matching, funding at the scale required, and meaningful evaluation.

‍

Transition schemes and their track records

The NSJS aims to help oil and gas workers into alternative energy or priority sectors by offering career guidance and advice, identifying training needs and funding, providing job-matching with potential guaranteed interviews or placements with prospective employers, and following-up with further support options if workers become unemployed. 

Transition schemes like the NSJS are not new. Spain's 2018 Just Transition Agreement, negotiated over six weeks with trade unions and energy companies (Endesa, Iberdrola, Naturgy, EDP), protected 1,677 workers at 28 closing coal mines as part of a broader €250 million investment scheme over 2019-2027. Hailed as a “model agreement” by unions, the scheme combined early retirement for workers over 48 or with 25 years' service and support for younger workers (€10,000 redundancy payments plus 35 days' pay per year of service and access to retraining for green industries), among others. Critically, the tripartite social dialogue process built trust between government, unions, and employers with unions subsequently organising local assemblies to communicate the deal to members - a factor that proved electorally beneficial for the government.

In addition, Germany has adopted a variety of policy programmes to address the decline of hard coal since the 1950s, and the reduction in lignite production since its Reunification. In 2019, the German Government allocated over €40 billion to cushion the negative economic and social consequences of the phase-out of coal in regions and to support 32,000 coal industry workers by 2038. Its transition initiatives include legislation and agreements covering social plans, adjustment payments, and retraining programmes for workers.

For the NSJS, it is the worker support elements of these schemes, retraining, income protection during transition, and social dialogue, that offer the most relevant lessons.

‍

Two different realities

When it comes to transition initiatives in the UK, delivery has proven challenging. The 1980s-90s coal transition operated in a different context - over 200,000 direct  jobs lost over a decade without a coherent economic strategy to create replacement employment in coalfield areas - but revealed design challenges that remain relevant. British Coal Enterprise's (BCE) Job and Career Change Scheme initially offered comprehensive retraining, but under pressure to show quick results and control costs, shifted to prioritising faster reemployment. 

This led to workers being placed in lower-skilled roles and coordination problems between multiple agencies (BCE, Training and Enterprise Councils, Employment Service), creating confusion for workers. The design pitfalls - prioritising speed over quality, poor coordination and inadequate outcome measurement - remain risks for any large-scale workforce transition program, including the NSJS.

More recently, the Energy Skills Passport illustrates the obstacles the NSJS will face. Conceived in 2021 to recognise qualifications across oil and gas and offshore wind and to reduce duplicate training, the passport has taken years to implement. The oil and gas skills service body OPITO's 2022 Just Transition Fund bid envisioned full deployment by Q3 2023; today, despite £5 million of funding from the Scottish Government, only a database exists allowing workers to upload skills and identify gaps. However, the core value proposition - qualification recognition across sectors - remains incomplete. Workers still face the full cost and time burden of duplicate training when moving between sectors.

Against this background, why do ambitious policy commitments fail to fully materialise in the UK? Stakeholders, including the UK and devolved governments, various industries, trade unions and training providers, are not pulling in the same direction. 

For example, some oil and gas companies are reluctant to engage in transition schemes for workers to move out of the sector, some training providers fear a fall in revenue if training needs are reduced, or coordination efforts to address barriers are poor because of political instability and uncertainty.

‍

How to bridge the gap

To deliver a “world-leading” NSJS, the Government must bridge the gap between policy commitments and delivery. The Ministry of Defence's Career Transition Partnership (CTP)¹ for armed forces leavers, which the Government is using as a model for this Service, offers a useful starting point, but the context of the North Sea demands a different approach. Delivering that requires five principles tailored to the realities of the North Sea:

‍1. Coordination, not duplication: if the NSJS is an outsourced service in that it will work alongside existing advice services and help workers identify opportunities across the whole training spectrum, the Government must lead coordination, not delegate it to a contractor. 

By doing so, the Service can act as an umbrella, ensuring coordination between existing services and eliminating duplication. This is essential to prevent breakdowns in communication between involved parties, and ensure workers promptly receive the support they need to move into other sectors.

‍2. Secure employer and worker participation: to ensure employers and workers across the whole basin participate in the NSJS, incentives are needed to retain buy-in. 

The Ministry of Defence’s CTP is successful because the Ministry is the sole employer. The picture in the North Sea, on the contrary, is fragmented, with many private employers and sole contractors, and no obligation to participate. Without employer commitments to recognise qualifications, to contribute to retraining costs, and to provide genuine job opportunities, workers could complete the necessary training but face barriers to subsequent employment.

The Government's interim Fair Work Charter offers a model: offshore wind developers bidding for contracts in Allocation Round 9 could be required to contribute to skills funds or meet minimum workforce development commitments, with the NSJS positioned as the delivery vehicle for these obligations. The North Sea Transition Authority should include participation in the NSJS in its Stewardship Expectations and factor delivery into licensing decisions, creating regulatory incentives for employer engagement.

Workers have demonstrated a clear appetite for transition. A recent survey of oil and gas workers found that 82% of those surveyed would consider leaving the industry. The Oil and Gas TTF, initially launched as a career advice and training funding pilot for 200 workers in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire, has seen 980 applications to date. Having approved 402 of these applications (41%), the Fund needs to rapidly scale up to meet demand. 

Thus, the challenge is not worker appetite but ensuring their engagement leads somewhere. Where employers choose not to participate, the Government must find alternative routes to guarantee that workers who come forward are met with genuine employment opportunities. 

Oil and gas workers have globally transferrable skills. Without credible domestic opportunities, there is a real risk that they will seek work elsewhere. The Government must, therefore, ensure that workers who engage with the NSJS have genuine pathways into good quality, permanent jobs in alternative energy or priority sectors, not just training that leads nowhere.

‍3. Skill mapping and skill matching: to successfully deliver the NSJS, detailed skill mapping of the workforce involved in offshore oil and gas and its supply chain and subsequent skill-matching and job-matching exercises are required. At the same time, skills auditing and forecasting are necessary to enable the development of courses to plug emerging skills gaps. 

In a coordinating role, the Government can ensure, through engagement from the oil and gas, renewables, and supply chain industries and unions, that these skill mapping, matching, auditing, and forecasting exercises lead to easy access for workers into actual new quality jobs.

‍4. Funding at the scale required: the backbone of successful end-to-end transition schemes is funding. The Ministry of Defence’s CTP is estimated to have a budget of around £11 million per annum - excluding additional funding elements available such as financial support towards academic qualifications or travel and subsistence costs for attending training activities. 

While the UK and Scottish governments have announced an £18 million boost in funding for the Oil and Gas TTF over the next three years, the success of the NSJS hinges, to a great extent, on available funding at the scale required. This includes not only funding for training courses alone, but also for implications on workers while they train, such as incurred expenses to attend training, being able to meet their living costs and to support their families.

‍5. Measuring outcomes, not outputs: the NSJS needs a clear strategy for evaluating its success. In comparison, the CTP's evaluation approach focuses predominantly on employment numbers, but these statistics do not prove that the CTP caused those outcomes. 

A comprehensive evaluation framework is the mechanism by which the Government demonstrates it has closed the gap between policy commitments and delivery. By integrating both employment outcomes and detailed metrics on workers’ experience and journey quality, it also enables effective, data driven improvements as well as positive story-telling, to demonstrate that the Government made the right decisions.

‍

The time is now

Since it has come into office, this Government has taken welcome first steps to address the barriers to oil and gas workers transitioning to renewable energy. They are, however, not yet sufficient to ensure that the UK’s transition is fair. According to the Just Transition Commission, “[i]nstead of planning for success, we are reacting to crises”. 

The stakes are significant: Aberdeen and North East Scotland's economic future depends on a successful transition; the UK's offshore wind sector, forecast to support 100,000 jobs by 2030, needs access to skilled workers; and workers with globally transferable skills will choose international roles over UK renewable opportunities if domestic support is inadequate. 

The time is now for the Government to plan for success by being as ambitious as possible, to make sure that energy workers and their communities come out of the UK’s shift to clean energy more secure and prosperous than today.

The Government can do so by learning from the past, by building on the already laid stepping stones, and by delivering a genuine NSJS, where ambitious promises on paper meet reality, from day one.

‍

***

‍

¹ Uplift commissioned Diagram Learning Studio to assess the MOD’s Career Transition Partnership’s (CTP) relevance for the North Sea Jobs Service (NSJS). The full report is available here.

‍