Future flight: closing the skills gaps

The Future Flight challenge for Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, will invest up to £500,000 in projects to close aviation industry skills gaps.

The aim of this competition is to create and deliver course content and materials that will support skills, talent and training across the future flight sector. The purpose of this is to build awareness of future flight emerging markets and fill key gaps in the UK’s workforce talent and training capabilities.

Projects can deliver one or more of these objectives (not an exhaustive list):

• schools’ engagement
• apprenticeships and internships
• upskilling and reskilling of existing workforce
• technical courses and vocational training
• undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing professional development (CPD)

Your project

Your project must:

• have a total grant funding request between £5,000 and £50,000
• start by 1 July 2023
• last between 3 and 6 months
• carry out all of its project work in the UK
• intend to exploit the results from or in the UK

Eligibility

To lead a project or work alone your organisation must be a UK registered:

• business of any size
• academic institution
• charity
• not for profit
• public sector organisation
• research and technology organisation (RTO)

An organisation can only lead on one application but can be included as a collaborator in a further 2 applications. If an organisation is not leading any application, it can collaborate in any number of applications.

Grant funding in this competition is awarded as Minimal Financial assistance (MFA). This allows public bodies to award up to £315,000 to an enterprise in a 3-year rolling financial period. To establish your eligibility, we need to check that our support added to the amount you have previously received does not exceed the limit of £315,000 in the ‘applicable period’.

You can request 100% funding for your eligible project costs up to a maximum of £50,000 per project.

Scope

The aim of this competition is to create and deliver course content and materials that will support skills, talent and training across the future flight sector. The purpose of this is to build awareness of future flight emerging markets and fill key gaps in the UK’s workforce talent and training capabilities.

Your project must demonstrate:

• alignment with the future flight roadmap and vision
• strong industrial links and a well defined industry focus
• an understanding and awareness of the future flight industrial skills that are currently lacking and possible future requirements to enable the workforce
• your planning and commitment to creating and maintaining your resource for a minimum period of 3 years after the funding period
• how you will provide new opportunities not already available to the UK, a region or group of underrepresented people
• value for money and evidence a return on investment, in terms of trained, upskilled and reskilled people
• an innovative, ambitious and realistic idea to meet a significant future flight talent requirement

Your project can:

• produce content and material for outreach, engagement and learning purposes
• conduct future flight outreach and engagement exercises to individuals, academia, industry and other groups
• generate and deliver course material or facilitate the running of courses
• provide training or incentives for training to specific groups of underrepresented people or in specific training subjects

This list is not intended to be exhaustive.

Support

An online briefing event will be held on 28th November, 10am-11.30am; click here to register for a place.

If you want help to find a project partner, contact Innovate UK KTN’s Transport team.