New Energy World Senior Editor Will Dalrymple MEI speaks to the founders of Offshore Wind Learning, Alastair Dutton and Chris Lloyd, about how they began, and the value of their award-winning e-learning programme for new entrants to the offshore wind sector and a wider professional audience globally.
It's been a busy few months for the team at Offshore Wind Learning, the e-learning package that introduces many aspects of the offshore wind industry to new players.
The £100 course, which is supported by the Energy Institute, consists of 30 lessons, each about one-hour long. Students are self-paced. Assisting the micro-learning approach are interactive features including flashcards, card sorting, matching descriptions, photos, videos, pop-up label graphics and interactive 3D models. A quiz sits at the end of each module, from which successful students earn a digital badge. A 30-question end-of-course exam provides learners a course completion certificate.
Not only has the team completed the second annual update of materials to reflect current market conditions and emerging trends in technology and design - including a reorganised fundamentals module and a new lesson on health and safety management, following consecutive years of reported fatalities. But in October, the course was 'highly commended at the Renewable UK Global Offshore Wind 2025 awards, within the Skills and People Award. Not bad for a scheme that is only 18 months old.
Highly commended at the Renewable UK Global Offshore Wind 2025 awards
Dutton sets the scene with his own story.
'From the age of 15, I knew I wanted to work in energy, went on to do an energy-specific degree (BSc in Energy Studies at Swansea University) and then started work in research and development. From there, I moved into industrial energy efficiency, combined heat and power and then renewables. While I was at BP, I did an analysis of the European renewables market and concluded that the way forward was offshore wind - and so it has proved. In the last 20 or so years I've been working solely in offshore wind.'
'In 2008, I joined The Crown Estate (landlords of the UK seabed) to run the Round 3 tender and subsequent development programme. It remains the largest offshore wind tender to date, creating 32 GW of development opportunity. On leaving, I worked as a civil servant for a year, advising on offshore wind policy. Then in 2017, I set up my one-man consultancy focused on taking offshore wind global.
Since that time, I have provided advice on offshore wind in 40 countries and, therefore, know that offshore wind is going worldwide.
At The Crown Estate, Dutton recruited Chris Lloyd to be Senior Development Manager on the offshore team. He recalls: 'Al is a great leader, allowing for the perfect balance of autonomy and support.'
During the latter stages of the pandemic, Dutton was speaking to his former colleague about the global growth of offshore wind. His view at the time was that: 'We had created a problem for ourselves. Simply put, there was a skills shortage, and it was only going to get worse.'
He continues: 'I had recently completed two e-learning projects for clients, including the World Bank, and together we decided that e-learning would be a great platform to attract people into the sector.'
To understand the scale of the skills shortage, Dutton did some research, combining the results of 14 employment studies on offshore wind. Based on those figures, he calculated that, at market scale, offshore wind creates just over two jobs per MW installed. Taking the International Energy Agency (IEA) and International Renewable Agency (IRENA) projections for offshore wind to meet net zero, implies that the sector needs one million new joiners in the next decade. Of that, 100,000 are needed in the UK alone.
Dutton picks up the story: 'Looking around the market, I could not find anyone focused long-term on attracting people into offshore wind. Therefore, Chris and I decided that we would tackle the problem ourselves, using the course to help educate the public, inform and attract people to come and work with us.'
Offshore Wind Learning was born. Lloyd, who had collaborated with Dutton on previous e-learning projects, recalls that they felt there was an opportunity for something bigger and better. He says: 'A lot of offshore wind in the early years was about capacity building of a wide range of stakeholders. The course is a synthesis of 20 years of explaining what offshore wind is all about.'
'We knew the necessary content, and the structure is kind of self-evident. The greater effort was about getting the level of detail, the order and the tone of the delivery right.'
Dutton recalls that the course structure began with eight modules, each of which was populated with 3-5 lessons per module. Then he handed over to Lloyd to draft the content for each of the lessons, which was reviewed by Dutton, bearing in mind his knowledge and previous e-learning projects. For further review, the draft lessons were shared with nine other reviewers, including subject matter experts and
complete novices.
He adds: 'It was at this point that I approached the Energy Institute and IMarEST [the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology], both of which enthusiastically chose to support us as founding partners and as part of the review process. Those partnerships continue today with both Institutes attracting students to our course.' (Since then, it has also signed up partners World Forum for Offshore Wind, Renewable Safety, ARMSA Academy and IM Training.)
"The course is a synthesis of 20 years of explaining what offshore wind is all about."
Since launching in April 2024, the course now has some 850 students, from 71 countries around the world, a third of whom have completed the material successfully. Dutton comments: 'It was written for people seeking to get a job in offshore wind, especially people selecting their first career and those transitioning from other sectors, but it has found a much wider audience including journalists, professors and consultants.'
A promising statistic, he points out, is that 40% of students are female, which is encouraging in an engineering sector.
Dutton continues: 'It is fascinating to see our student population. Many are individuals hungry for knowledge and seeking jobs. More recently we've seen organisations adopt our training. These include many governments, for example Australia, Canada, Brazil, India and the Philippines.'
He adds that organisations, including developers, supply chain companies, consultants, financiers and permitting bodies, are using the training to induct new starters. (For their benefit, a feature called 'Seat Manager' allows organisations to monitor the progress of their students and, if necessary, nudge them on.)
Students that finish the main course looking to take a first step towards employment in the sector benefit from a free, additional 'signposting' lesson that maps out all the choices for further study, specialisation or job hunting. Options covered include apprenticeships, internships, technician training, university or other more specialist job training.
But the course isn't only for jobseekers, Lloyd points out. 'Some of the most valuable feedback has been from offshore wind specialists in one area (for example, health and safety) learning how the full industry works (for example, financing),' he says.
Keeping the 10-year horizon in mind, Dutton has also turned his attention to students, which opens up an even larger demographic. He explains: 'Following presentations at a Green Careers Week at Colchester Prep & High School, Karen [Gracie-Langrick], the headteacher, was kind enough to take our content and back-engineer it into 12 lesson plans and the scheme of work for 11-14 year-olds. Following this, we were asked to prepare content for primary schools. Through our partnership with WeSET, that has now been done. Both the primary and secondary school content is free to download at
www.offshorewindlearning.com/schools. (WeSET stands for the Westmill Sustainable Energy Trust, a charity funded by the Swindon-based 11 MW-capacity wind and solar farms).
