A wide-reaching analysis of the UK shipbuilding sector, just launched by the National Shipbuilding Office (NSO), seeks input from workers and employers to assess skills dependencies within the industry.

A new website is now live ( https://www.lorefully.com/projectkeel ) which contains a series of engagement exercises for workers of all different backgrounds, trades, and skills profiles within the sector to help better target policy interventions aimed at supporting skills.

The initiative, named Project Keel, is being led by the NSO in partnership with start-up technology firm, Lorefully, and innovation agency, Connected Places Catapult, to directly engage with industry across all nations of the UK through a combination of surveys, interviews, and roundtable discussions.

Supply and demand for particular skills within the industry has historically presented a significant challenge for UK shipbuilders, and Project Keel seeks to understand how employees move between businesses to gain insight on how this affects the skills dependencies within.

The initiative also aims to provide insight on the interdependencies between naval, commercial and leisure shipbuilding, so that we can better support the civil side of the sector.

Lorefully will conduct the engagement on behalf of the NSO, using their platform to capture answers to questions, speed up analysis and processing of the response data to reveal trends and insights – delivering a full report within a matter of weeks, as opposed to the months a traditional survey of this kind would take.

By running multiple types of engagement and analysis concurrently, Project Keel aims to generate a well-balanced dataset that reflects the lived experience of the people who make up the UK shipbuilding workforce.

The initiative is being funded through Innovate UK’s Transport Accelerator: Maritime programme which supports SMEs with pioneering solutions that could be applicable to maritime and the wider transport sector.

For more information and to find out how you can contribute to Project Keel, visit:  https://www.lorefully.com/projectkeel