The publication of this 2021 Annual Report marks the end of year two of GWO’s three-year “Safety Without Borders” strategy. At the time of its launch, two years of pandemic seemed inconceivable, but today individuals and states are still struggling. However closer to home within the wind sector a new (nearly) normal has prevailed ensuring not only that the lights never went out, they now burn even brighter.
The 2020 strategy included the deliberately stretching strategic goal of building a GWO trained workforce to more than 200,000 people. The interim goal for 2021 was set to reach a GWO Trained Workforce of 150,000 people by 31st December 2021. During 2021 the pattern of the 21% growth in trained workforce over 2020 was impressive, and increasing at a high rate with a new total of over 122,500 individuals.
The GWO Trained Workforce is a number representing course participants holding at least one valid training record in GWO’s WINDA database. At the end of 2021, the GWO Trained Workforce was 122,573, who hold between them a total of 557,462 valid GWO training records. Among those valid records, 85% have an expiration date (usually 2 years) and will need to be refreshed within the next 24 months.
GWO also tracks the increase in the number of participants trained over time. Between 2020 and 2021 this rose from 61,318 to 80,489 in 2021 an increase of 31% . During the same years these participants completed 225,347 training records rising to 316, 833 , an increase of 41% year on year.
The countries with the largest proportions of total GWO Trained Workforce are: United Kingdom (17,016 participants with at least one valid record), Spain (13,188), Germany (12,193), Denmark (11,424), United States of America (8,134), and Brazil (7,139).
In 2021, GWO saw a return to the seasonal profile of safety training seen in 2019 and earlier with a pronounced peak in March related to the milder weather prevalent in the northern hemisphere and the burst of onsite construction activity during the following six months.
Similar to previous years, the training records most commonly issued were: Working At Heights (41,554 training records in 2021), Manual Handling (39,316), Fire Awareness (38,335), First Aid (37,716). Each of those training records saw an average increase of +40% compared to 2020.
The training records that grew the most in 2021 were: ART-NR (1,115 records issued, +271% versus 2020), ART-HR (1,270, +173%), SART-N (5,544, +114%), SLS (3,241, +114%), SART-H (6,540, +105%). The growth of these training records shows how the GWO community is expanding the availability of more GWO courses across the world. In particularly, the courses on Advanced Rescue and the Slinger Signaller/ Rigger Signal Person training standards.
With 82 newly GWO certified training providers joining the GWO community, 2021 was the most successful year for the growth of the community since the start of WINDA (+23% over 2020).
At the end of 2021, 444 GWO training providers from 48 countries were certified to deliver GWO courses, with five countries newly represented in the network: Columbia, Croatia, Egypt, Russia and Ukraine.
Several markets saw a higher number of new certifications including Brazil (+10 new training providers), Spain (+9), India (+8), France (+8), China (+7), Poland (+6) and United States of America (+5).
Disclaimer: WINDA data
This data is an unaudited extract from GWO’s WINDA database and should be used for information purposes only. GWO is constantly refining its reporting structures resulting in some potential movements as baselines shift over time.