The Energy & Utility Skills Register – EUSR – is part of Energy & Utility Skills Limited and it includes the following:

Energy & Utility Skills provides membership, assurance, and skills solutions to help employers attract, develop, and retain a sustainable, skilled workforce to ensure the seamless delivery of essential services to 67 million people and UK industry every day.

The Energy & Utilities Independent Assessment Service works with employers, training providers, and approved technical experts to deliver robust and rigorous apprenticeship end-point assessment services across the energy and utilities sector.

Energy & Utilities Jobs brings together 20 leading employers offering a range of career opportunities including apprenticeships, graduate programmes, and professional opportunities. There’s a role for everyone, with training opportunities, career development and stability.

The National Skills Academy for Power sits at the heart of the power sector, driving excellence in skills and bringing together employers, skills organisations, and stakeholders.

A major skill required in the construction industry is that of having the ability to locate and identify buried services. Underground services can be absolutely anywhere, and it is vital that any contractor who needs to carry out any sort of excavation work is fully aware of underground services in the location where the digging is necessary. Striking underground services can produce a variety of complications.

At best, the men carrying out the work will have to stand around doing nothing until the utility has been repaired, so the contract will be delayed. Local businesses and residents may be without water, telecoms, electricity, and so on, until the repairs have been carried out. This can result in loss of business and at the very least, inconvenience. The repairs themselves can be costly. It can cause reputational damage to the contractor involved.

Worst of all, the workers themselves, the men on site actually doing the digging, can suffer injuries which can be anything from minor to life-changing, and may on occasion be fatal. There are approximately a dozen fatalities in the UK every year caused by striking underground services. This is why it is critical to undertake a thorough site survey before carrying out any work.

However, undertaking a site survey is something that needs specialist training in both the use of the tools required – the CAT, Genny, and GRP – the interpretation of the results produced, and knowledge that things may not always be as they seem. By that last part, we mean that the tools may not always provide an accurate reading because they have certain limitations. Our EUSR cable avoidance training at Sygma Solutions goes into great depth and includes EUSR hsg47 which covers the guidance from the HSE.

Our EUSR cable avoidance training will provide operatives with the knowledge that GPR, for instance, may not be able to give an accurate result because of ground conditions. Equally, an electricity cable could be buried at a depth greater than the CAT can read, giving the impression there is nothing there when, in fact, there is. Our EUSR hsg47 training covers everything that an operative will ever need to know.