Tickets & Training: The Hidden Costs For Offshore Oil & Gas Workers

These findings are from a survey of 610 offshore oil and gas workers conducted by Platform, Friends of the Earth Scotland and Greenpeace UK.

The survey results show a workforce in insecure employment, where workers are bearing the brunt of training and certification costs previously borne by employers. This follow up survey on training and certificate costs comes after the release of the report OFFSHORE: Oil and gas workers’ views on industry conditions and the energy transition and hundreds of conversations with oil and gas workers about their working conditions and visions for the future.

Of the 610 respondents, 53.8% live in Scotland, 40.4% in England, 3.1% in the rest of the UK and the remaining 2.7% outside of the UK. The survey found that these workers are paying an average of over £1,800 a year in training costs.

Other key survey results show:

•  97% are concerned about the UK’s offshore energy industry training costs
•  74.5% are employed ad-hoc as contractors
•  87.7% say they spend a LOT of their own money on training costs, tickets and workplace expenses to work offshore
•  69% spent over £2000 of their own money on training including safety and trade-specific costs in the last two years, which is up 15% from before 2015
•  65% said their employer contributed 0% to their training costs including safety and first aid training in the past two years, which is up from 45% before 2015
• 62% believed certificates they were asked to obtain duplicate skills they acquired at NVQ, City and Guilds or equivalent
• 62% had been asked to obtain an overlapping qualification when changing employers despite their current qualifications being in-date
• 44% had been asked by a single employer to repeat training for each new contract, despite having in-date certificates
• 94% of respondents said they would support an offshore training passport