Thought Leadership: Skills passports

Skills passports are increasingly being promoted as a way of improving workforce mobility, recognising transferable skills, and helping employers identify talent. Port Skills and Safety recently submitted a response to Skills England’s survey on skills passports on behalf of the port sector. Drawing on the key themes from that response, our Skills Lead, Angela Ward, examines why the sector’s discussion about skills passports should begin with a more fundamental question: is the port sector ready for one yet?

Skills passports are attracting growing interest across a range of sectors, with the promise of making skills, qualifications, and experience more visible, transferable, and easier to verify. On the surface, the concept is attractive. Employers want confidence that people have the skills they need. Individuals want their skills recognised and valued. Governments want better workforce mobility and stronger domestic skills pipelines.

A skills passport is only as valuable as the information it contains. If the underlying data is inconsistent, poorly defined, or interpreted differently across organisations, a passport risks becoming little more than a digital record of inconsistency. Before any sector can benefit fully from skills passports, it must first establish a common understanding of roles, skills, competencies, and training requirements.

This is where the port sector currently has an important opportunity. Significant work is already underway to improve the consistency of skills and competency arrangements across ports. Port Skills and Safety has been leading work to develop career pathways, improve understanding of occupational requirements, and support the development of standards and competency frameworks.

These initiatives help define how skills relate to occupations, progression routes, and future opportunities, which is the very information a skills passport would ultimately rely upon to provide meaningful value to employers and individuals. These foundations may not attract the same attention as a new digital platform, but they are arguably the more important part of the journey.

Without this groundwork, a skills passport cannot provide the trust, portability, and transparency that employers and individuals need. If one organisation records competence differently from another, or if skills are defined inconsistently across employers, the passport simply reflects those differences rather than resolving them.

This challenge becomes even more important when considering workforce mobility across the UK. Ports operate within a national network, with organisations, supply chains, and workers often working across devolved nations. If skills passports are to support genuine portability, they must align with occupational standards and competency frameworks across all four nations, rather than creating new points of divergence.

This is particularly relevant to the port sector, where safety-critical activities are undertaken every day. Employers need confidence that individuals operating plant and equipment, undertaking lifting operations, or carrying out cargo handling activities meet clearly defined standards and, where necessary, regulatory requirements. A skills passport may help make this information easier to access, but only if there is confidence in the underlying standards and verification processes.

The discussion is not solely about compliance. Done well, skills passports could play an important role in supporting workforce mobility and career progression. One of the challenges facing the port sector is helping people understand how their existing skills might transfer into new opportunities. Many port roles draw upon capabilities developed in sectors such as construction, engineering, logistics, energy, and manufacturing. Greater visibility of transferable skills could help individuals recognise opportunities they may not previously have considered, while also helping employers identify suitable candidates who may not have direct sector experience but possess relevant capability.

This has implications not only for recruitment but also for wider workforce planning. As ports continue to respond to changing technologies, decarbonisation, automation, and new operational demands, the ability to identify transferable skills and emerging capability requirements will become increasingly important. Skills passports could support this by enabling employers to recognise existing talent and assisting individuals in navigating career transitions.

There is an opportunity to support those returning to the workforce and individuals looking to change careers. Too often, valuable experience gained in previous roles is overlooked because it is difficult to evidence or compare. A trusted and widely recognised skills passport could help make those skills more visible, opening opportunities for individuals while widening the talent pool available to employers.

However, technology alone will not solve skills shortages. A skills passport cannot create skills where they do not exist. What it can do is provide better visibility of the skills available, highlight gaps more clearly, and support more informed workforce planning. Where shortages exist, addressing them will still require investment in training, apprenticeships, competency development, and workforce attraction.

For skills passports to succeed, they must be trusted by employers and valued by individuals. They must integrate with existing systems rather than create additional administration, and they must support recognised standards rather than introduce competing approaches. Most importantly, they depend on the continued development of the underlying frameworks that give them meaning.

The risk is that attention moves too quickly to building skills passports before the foundations are in place to support them. Skills passports may well become an important part of the skills landscape. But before focusing on how to record skills, there must be cross-industry agreement on what good looks like.

The real challenge is not creating a passport, but building a system of skills, competency, and progression that is worth recording.