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C-DICE Roadmap for Higher-Level Skills Readiness for the Net Zero Transition

A five year plan for the advanced skills requirements for Net Zero by 2050

Why was the C-DICE Roadmap created?

Progress towards net zero will require advances in technology and innovation, investment, and a skilled workforce.

Much of the existing discussion and debate in relation to the skills needed for the net zero transition focuses on the technical and installer workforce, while largely omitting the requirements for a higher-level skilled workforce – for researchers, specialists, managers and leaders. These roles will be essential to provide leadership for, as well as the competency to innovate and drive forward a just transition to net zero carbon.

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The Challenges identified by C-DICE
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The Centre for Postdoctoral Development in Infrastructure, Cities and Energy (C-DICE) Grand Challenge set out to investigate:  

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  • the skills requirements of industry for the net zero transition,  

  • how our highly skilled PhD and postdoc community can support these requirements, 

  • whether changes are needed in PhD and postdoc development to help support the industry demands for skills. 
     

The C-DICE Grand Challenge in December 2023 gathered and processed the views of representatives from industry, academia, funders and Government and structured them into a set of 12 challenges. 

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These 12 challenges were then prioritised, and a series of tasks identified to progress change against the challenges. The tasks are set out in a five-year roadmap.  

The Grand Challenge

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The Actions

The C-DICE Roadmap identifies the breakdown of tasks under each challenge needed to progress change against the challenges identified in the C-DICE Grand Challenge.​

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The Actions

12 November 2024, 12:00 - 16:00
Online

Roadmap Event

The C-DICE Roadmap Event was hosted online for participants to:

  • hear more about the challenges and the work ongoing

  • find out more about the tasks and the roadmap's five year plan

  • be part of the debate on how to move forward​​

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Welcome and Roadmap Introduction

Kathryn North

Director, C-DICE

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Reflections on the Roadmap

Frances Burstow

Director Talent and Skills, UKRI

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Developing Skills for the Clean Energy Transition

Jude Knight

Head of Low Carbon Skills, Cogent Skills

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Panel: Strategic Leadership for Net Zero Skills

Julie Maykels, Head of Learning and Skills - Rolls Royce SMR 

Debbie Johnson, Head of Innovation Talent and Skills - Innovate UK

Danni Croucher, Policy Impact Lead - NCUB

Aidan Rhodes - Energy Futures Lab/UKERC

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Break

15 minute break

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Panel: Existing Good Practice and Next Steps

Fiona McBride - Prosper

Lennie Foster - C-DICE

Yolana Pringle - Vitae

Swathi Mukundan - Postdoc, Loughborough University

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Closing Session

David Saal

C-DICE Impact Hub Director

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Speakers

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Frances Burstow

Director for Talent and Skills
UK Research and Innovation

Frances Burstow has been the Director for Talent and Skills for UK Research and Innovation since July 2022. She has responsibility for leading the strategic development of UKRI’s approach to talent and skills and the transition to working in a collective manner across its £2b of talent initiatives. 

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In her previous role as Deputy Director for Skills and Methods at ESRC, Frances led the Councils investment and policies in the area of researcher skills development, methodological development and innovation and equality, diversity and inclusion and Co-Chaired the cross UKRI Research and Innovation Careers Network. 

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She joined ESRC in 2004 from local government and has worked in a variety of roles since then, including strategic lead for longitudinal studies and head of research grants and policy. 

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Kathryn North

APVC for Climate Change and Net Zero, Loughborough University
Director, C-DICE

Kathryn is Director of C-DICE and Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor for Climate Change and Net Zero at Loughborough University. She has held the positions of Head of Researcher Development at Loughborough, Head of Skills for the Energy Research Accelerator (ERA) and she leads the skills programme for HyDEX, a £5m programme to develop a hydrogen economy in the midlands. Kathryn’s background is in Biology; she gained her PhD at Lancaster University in 2004 and was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, prior to joining Loughborough in 2007 as researcher development manager. 

 

Through C-DICE, Kathryn is driving a step-change in postdoctoral development, providing opportunities for researchers to develop their careers, for research and innovation to achieve net-zero, and for industry. 

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Jude Knight

Head of Low Carbon Strategy
Cogent Skills

Jude has over 25 years’ experience in the skills sector, working in operational and strategic functions at regional and national level. In her previous role as Policy Lead for Green Skills at the UK government’s Department for Education, Jude led the department’s strategic green skills policy work, working across government to develop a comprehensive workforce action plan to help deliver the Government’s net zero and environmental targets.

 

As Cogent’s Head of Low Carbon Strategy, Jude leads the green skills agenda, working with employers and other stakeholders to build a skilled workforce for the UK’s shift to a low-carbon economy. 

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Chris Gorse

Professor of Construction Management and Engineering
Loughborough University

Professor Gorse is Professor of Construction Management and Engineering – School of the Architecture Building and Civil Engineering, Chair of the International Conference for Sustainable Ecological Engineering Design for Society (SEEDS), Past Chair Association of Researchers in Construction Management (ARCOM) and a founding member of the Building Performance Network. 

 

Chris started out as an Engineer and Project Manager, with a background in contracting and consultancy.  As Director for the Loughborough Construction and Surveying Group at Loughborough, he leads a multidiscipline team with expertise in buildings, construction, engineering, building performance, behavioural studies, AI, digital systems and data science.  He is currently working with the National Health Service, National Physics Laboratories, Ministry of Defence and Depart of Education and other private institutions on smart measurement and control systems for asset management. 

 

Chris has led many national and major international research programmes as PI and Co I including energy infrastructure projects for nuclear, renewable technologies and hydrogen.   

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Julie Maykels

Head of Learning and Skills
Rolls Royce SMR

Julie Maykels has a diverse work history with a career focussed on skills and people development, with experience in both the public and private sector and in business starts-ups and mature organisations.

 

Julie currently serves as the Head of Learning & Skills at Rolls-Royce SMR, overseeing the development and implementation of Learning and Skills Strategies to support regulatory and government requirements and business need. Julie has 17 years’ experience in the nuclear sector, having worked at Horizon Nuclear Power, NuGen Ltd and the National Skills Academy for Nuclear. 

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Danni Croucher

Policy Impact Lead
NCUB

Danni Croucher is policy and public affairs lead at the National Centre for Universities and Business - NCUB - where she works to drive impact and engagement across the education and innovation policy landscape. 

 

She previously developed the organisation’s Skills and Talent portfolio, leading this workstream from 2022. Danni joined NCUB from the Institute of Physics (IOP), where she led R&D, education and diversity and inclusion policy, and has further worked in policy, analysis and public affairs at government laboratory NPL, and in social policy at Which? 

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Debbie Johnson

Head of Innovation Talent and Skills
Innovate UK

Debbie Johnson is Head of Innovation Talent & Skills at Innovate UK, the UK’s Innovation Agency. Debbie’s work supports the innovation ecosystem as well as talent strategy within UKRI.

 

At Innovate UK Debbie is focused on two goals: supporting innovative businesses in accessing and developing talent to realise the UK’s innovation ambition and ensuring that the education and skills system is supported in responding to the changes created by our innovation to maximise its potential for our economy and society.  


Prior to joining Innovate UK in 2020, Debbie was involved in the design and implementation of collaboratively funded, business-led skills programmes in the construction sector. 

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Aidan Rhodes

Research Fellow

Imperial College London

Dr Aidan Rhodes is a Research Fellow based at Imperial College London. He is currently Energy Policy Briefing Papers Fellow at the Energy Futures Lab, working on preparing a range of accessible briefing papers on topics of relevance to energy sector policymakers and stakeholders. 

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Aidan is an expert on UK energy policy and innovation strategy, with a particular emphasis on smart systems and networks. He has presented widely at events both in the UK and internationally, is the author of several influential reports in the smart systems and heat sector, and has facilitated several information-sharing missions between the UK and Asia-Pacific nations including Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan. 

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Chris Rogers

Professor of Geotechnical Engineering
University of Birmingham

Chris Rogers researches sustainability, resilience and liveability of cities, infrastructure and urban systems, and how systemic changes can be designed and implemented to realise greatest value. With a particular interest in the ‘urban metabolism’, he focusses on buried infrastructure and utility services, trenchless technologies, use of underground space and infrastructure systems’ interdependencies.

 

A Lead Expert of the UK Government Foresight Future of Cities project, project lead of Mapping and Assessing the Underworld programme and founder member of the UK Collaboratorium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC), his current research embraces robots for pipeline condition assessment and the ground as an ecosystem service provider.  

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Lennie Foster

Skills Manager
Energy Research Accelerator and C-DICE

Lennie is the Skills Manager for the Energy Research Accelerator (ERA) Skills Academy, and C-DICE (Centre for Postdoctoral Development in Infrastructure Cities and Energy), helping provide world-class doctoral and postdoctoral development programmes respectively. These programmes aim to grow a pipeline of world-class talent to meet green growth and Net-Zero challenges.

 

Lennie joined Loughborough University in 2017, first as part of the Research Quality and Visibility Team, and then as a Research Development Manager. She gained a PhD in Systems Biology from the University of Warwick working with researchers in the Life Science and Computer Science departments. 

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Fiona McBride

Senior Researcher Developer (Prosper)
University of Liverpool

Fiona McBride is a Senior Researcher Developer within The Academy at the University of Liverpool, where her work focuses on Prosper – an ambitious and innovative model of postdoc career development designed to unlock postdocs’ potential to thrive across multiple career pathways, both within and beyond academia.

 

She oversees the Prosper team on a day-to-day basis, and is responsible for both its UKRI-funded rollout to the wider UK HEI sector, as well as embedding the model within the University of Liverpool. 

 

Fiona has played a key role in Prosper from its start in 2019 as a Research England Development (RED) fund project, co-ordinating its pilot cohorts, developing and co-creating the Prosper model and resources. She is a former postdoc, holding a doctorate in Chemistry (specialising in surface science). 

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Yolana Pringle

Head of Policy and Advocacy
Vitae

Dr Yolana Pringle is Head of Policy and Advocacy at Vitae. She leads on activities that develop impact from Vitae's expertise on researcher development and research culture. She has an academic background, with over 10 years' international research experience, as well as leadership of a national subject association.

 

Prior to joining Vitae in 2023, Yolana was Senior Lecturer in the History of Medicine at the University of Roehampton. This followed postdoctoral positions at the University of Warwick and the University of Cambridge. Her research focused on psychiatry and mental health, with a regional focus on eastern Africa, and resulted in a book and numerous peer-reviewed articles. This background drives Yolana's interests in equity in international research partnerships and researcher wellbeing and mental health. 

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Yolana holds a DPhil in Modern History from the University of Oxford and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. 

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Swathi Mukundan

Postdoctoral Researcher
Loughborough University

Swathi Mukundan is a postdoctoral researcher with C-DICE at Loughborough University, focusing on identifying high-level skill gaps in the UK industry’s path to net zero and addressing the impacts of researcher precarity in academic institutions. 

She earned her PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Queensland, Australia, specialising in biofuel production from paper-pulp industrial waste.

 

Before joining C-DICE, Swathi worked with the UKRI Chemical Circular Economy Centre, where she developed chemical technologies to convert biomass and end-of-life plastics into olefins for industrial reuse. She has also collaborated with policymakers on construction waste management. Swathi is dedicated to creating sustainable solutions to address critical challenges in waste management and advance the circular economy. 

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David Saal

Professor of Microeconomics, Loughborough University
Impact Hub Director, C-DICE

David Saal is the C-DICE Impact Hub Director and has over twenty years of academic and policy related experience in cost, productivity and efficiency measurement and its application to infrastructure industries.  He joined Loughborough University in 2014 as a Professor of Microeconomics after 15 years at Aston University and was Head of Economics until 2017. 

 

He became Loughborough Business School’s Impact Director in December 2022, and is also currently Co-Director of both the Sustainable Hydrogen Centre for Doctoral Training, and Loughborough Business School’s Centre for Productivity and Performance. His recent research and consulting projects particularly focus on restructuring, regulation, and cost performance in the UK and Japanese water and sewage industries. 

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