Arthur Ransier, Director of Business Strategy at nTech Workforce, highlights this monumental opportunity for offshore wind investors and contractors, “Applying staffing & labor best practices, in partnership with a skilled General Contractor which is responsible for the day-to-day oversight and planning for construction, improves ROI by ensuring sufficient project management, a skilled workforce, enhancing safety, managing labor costs, and mitigating risks. Having the right people with the right skills in the right roles at the right time is tricky business; a staffing intermediary complements your general contractor by ensuring workers are appropriately trained & experienced, reducing downtime and increasing overall project efficiency. Bringing a staffing & labor intermediary on board means improving your ability to adapt & respond to the trickiest resource to manage – people.”
General Contractors deliver value through construction planning and day-to-day project oversight. Many have robust supply chain management teams responsible for direct & indirect categories, ordering supplies, and engaging vendors of all types to deliver within scope, schedule, and budget. However, a dedicated staffing intermediary is adept at building and managing workforces; a staffing intermediary brings decades of established relationships – spanning pre-apprenticeship programs in the nonprofit sector, workforce development agencies in the public sector, Union and Non-Union subcontractors, minority-owned businesses – which ultimately gives you access to a diverse workforce including millions of workers. Research shows that diverse companies outperform less diverse companies; a McKinsey study from 2014-2019 found that companies in the top quartile for cultural diversity were around 35% more profitable than those in the fourth quartile.
In offshore wind, where heavy upfront investments exist and an even greater demand for long-term ROI, diversity – and working with a staffing intermediary to achieve it – will pay dividends.
How Do You Implement a Staffing & Labor Program for Offshore Wind (OSW) Projects?
A staffing intermediary delivers a holistic managed staffing & labor solution that improves pathways into OSW jobs. Partnering with the general contractor and developer, the staffing intermediary can leverage planning data to project upcoming hiring needs (minimum 6 months out), share that knowledge with subcontractors, and connect them to workforce agencies & nonprofits that offer pre-apprenticeship programs. Ultimately, a staffing intermediary improves access to good-paying OSW jobs, provides standards and templates for subcontractors to provide ongoing training & development through apprenticeships, and builds a reliable talent pipeline for developers and general contractors to get work done by serving as a staffing & labor catalyst at a program-management level. If needed, the staffing intermediary can integrate a bespoke training program by engaging third parties.
A staffing intermediary is responsible for the strategy, management, and administration of the contingent workforce supply chain, which includes numerous tasks such as the following:
Your staffing intermediary has a lot to offer and will be able to go beyond the day-to-day tasks of administering technology for your organization’s staffing & labor needs. While specific service-level agreements will need to be discussed, and aligned with your needs, here are a few to get started:
In alignment with offshore wind goals to develop good-paying, local, and highly-skilled jobs in sustainable energy, nTech Workforce – through its Managed Staffing & Labor Services – offers developers a system for engaging staffing & labor supply chain partners which is (a) easy for stakeholders to use, (b) adds greater efficiencies, and (c) sustains long-term value. We expect to provide developers with a more resilient, adaptable, and reliable workforce, thereby improving long-term investment returns and growth opportunities.