West Midlands Gigafactory appoints skills ambassador
West Midlands Gigafactory joint venture has announced the appointment of EV recruitment CEO and founder Steve Doyle as the project’s skills ambassador.
Doyle will work in a consultancy basis as he continues as CEO of EVera Recruitment, a battery and EV recruitment firm. He has 25 years of experience in recruitment and education, including work as a PhD careers advisor for The Faraday Institution, and will lead on skills and recruitment for the project.
Setting up his first EV and Hybrid Recruitment Division in 2008, Doyle has built teams from major OEMs to start-up tech companies. Since turning his attention to the battery sector in 2017, he devised a recruitment strategy for gigafactory recruitment, understanding it to be far more complex and challenging – attracting skills from parallel industries for battery manufacturing.
Steve Doyle said: “The world is being electrified and our workforce needs to be.
“In an industry facing skills shortages, we need to implement new recruitment models that can overcome this and succeed – quickly. The skill sets within the gigafactory space are often transferable from the automotive, pharmaceutical or food industries.
“For instance, if you break the production line down into stages and look at the lithium powder mixing section, you quickly realise that it’s very similar to what Nestlé is doing with its KitKat line. Coating sections are very similar to processes in the printing industry. And then for the electrolyte-filling section of the production line, I found a company that was putting soya sauce into sachets for sushi restaurants. These are near-neighbour skills that can be usefully applied for batteries.”
Mike Murray, West Midlands Gigafactory Project Director, said: “Based in the heart of the UK’s manufacturing sector – West Midlands Gigafactory is placed in the Skills Capital of the UK with unrivalled access to current and future automotive talent. The site will create up to 6,000 new highly skilled jobs directly and thousands more in the supply chain, with the potential for 60 GWh per annum.
“It is vital at this stage of our project to assign a leading industry skills ambassador to support the success of our recruitment process in a market facing a skills shortage. We are thrilled to have Steve’s guidance and wealth of knowledge to educate the next phase of the project as we look to secure what is most important – the people.”
Councillor Jim O’Boyle, Cabinet Member for Jobs, Regeneration and Climate Change at Coventry City Council, said: “Powered by 100% sustainable, clean, green energy with direct access to a Net Zero transport and logistics infrastructure, we hope to show future employees how advantageous West Midlands Gigafactory is for the UK and with Steve’s experience and guidance, how convenient it is too. Coventry is leading the green industrial revolution and our ambition for a gigafactory is about climate change and about skills and job opportunities.”
Image courtesy of EVera
