Former forces commander chief Rob Nitsch reveals how his commitment to public service took him from warzones to vocational qualifications via a stint developing apprenticeships at IfATE.

Right now, around 750,000 people are doing apprenticeships based on standards Rob Nitsch personally approved when he was the de facto number two at the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education.

He does not claim those standards are perfect, but says he feels “massively privileged” to have played a role in building the apprenticeship system – even though the new government is poised to overhaul it.

Now, as new chief executive of the Federation of Awarding Bodies (FAB), he is focused on a new mission: to change its “bumper sticker” mandate from being the “voice of awarding and assessment” to “improving qualifications and assessment”.

Nitsch left his position as IfATE’s delivery director during a wave of redundancies this summer to lead FAB. His new employer was also facing turbulence. Nitsch is FAB’s third chief in under a year, with his predecessor, Kion Ahadi, lasting just two months.

But Nitsch is used to steering organisations through choppy waters, both literally and metaphorically. He once led the UK’s response to major national flooding and was tasked with axing 7,000 jobs as the British Army’s chief employment officer.

Giving more than taking

And yet, Nitsch feels he has lived a “privileged life”.

His strong sense of civic responsibility, nurtured during a 43-year career in public service, means he always tries to “give more than I take”.

It is why he hesitantly took on the role of chair of governors at City of Portsmouth College (which he can see from his bedroom window) last year. He joined the board in 2020, shortly after “serious leadership and governance issues” placed the college in government intervention.

He was asked three times to take the role before “caving in”. The college has just emerged from financial intervention and Nitsch is now feeling optimistic it will progress from ‘requires improvement’ to ‘good’ after its latest Ofsted assessment this month.

He tells me the role helps him see the FE sector “from front to back” and “understand the pressures on delivery”.

T Level trouble

That delivery includes rolling out T Levels, which Nitsch was intimately involved in developing at IfATE.

He believes challenges with T Levels and apprenticeship standards emerged due to a mismatch of supply and demand.

And he fears IfATE’s successor, Skills England, will face similar problems if it fails to consider that training providers, end-point assessment organisations and awarding organisations “all need to turn up to make this work”.

He says: “You can create the most glorious demand signal in the world. But if you’re not also helping the market meet it, it’s not a system and it ain’t gonna work.”

While the English skills system is sometimes criticised for its complexity, Nitsch argues the specialist nature of its component parts is an asset if they join up cohesively.

He learned in his former career as an army commander that “it’s not so much about where you line up units, it’s on the margins and overlaps that it becomes tricky. That’s where you need to focus attention”.

Family history

The thread of public service runs deep in Nitsch’s family; three generations have 70 years of continuous army service between them, with him, his father and one of his sons all serving as army engineers.

Although Nitsch followed an academic route, he responds best to vocational types of learning, as have all four of his children; one son is a cruise ship deck officer, another a policeman, and his daughter is training to be a dancer.

Nitsch was sponsored by the army for his last two years at boarding school and for a mechanical engineering degree at Southampton University, before becoming an engineer specialising in repairing armoured vehicles. He admits that tanks excite him.

Causing a strike

He was, therefore, happy to take on a chartered engineer work placement at a tank factory in Leeds after stints in Cold War-era Germany and Cyprus.

At first, Nitsch’s fellow workers considered him a “military southern Jessie”; he admits he’s “a bit posh”.

But he gained a hard reputation after being spotted drinking in a notorious local pub, where alcohol was served “through grilles” with “wooden tables and sawdust on the floor”. He was amused when gossip spread that he was a regular there.

Seeing the funny side

Nitsch appreciates the humour in life’s mishaps.

During the first Iraq War, upon being sent into the desert to lead work repairing air defence systems, he mistakenly camped in an old desert quarry. After a night of pouring rain he woke to the laughter of his men who had spotted he was under water.

Later in his career he led a team of engineers who drove Green Goddess fire engines in Lancashire during the 2002 national fire service strikes.

When Nitsch was asked to attend a police station he assumed it was to congratulate him on the “great job” they were doing. Instead, he was shown a video of one of his unit’s fire engines driving 83mph down the M6. Nitsch’s engineers had removed the speed limiters.

Brave moments

His army career also featured nerve-wracking moments of bravery. When his unit in Iraq had to cross minefields to reach Kuwait, Nitsch made it his job to “find a route through” for others to follow.

Another scary ordeal, in Afghanistan, was being dropped off alone by an American helicopter at night in what he believed to be Sangin (then a deadly battlefield). Nitsch had his gun out, ready for action, but fortunately found himself on the edge of the army air base Camp Bastion.

He was initially sent to Afghanistan as lead logistician and was then tasked with joining an US investigation into the death of British aid worker Linda Norgrove. They concluded she was killed by American special forces sent to rescue her.

During the investigation, a Daily Mail report, which now hangs in Nitsch’s toilet, questioned what the “blanket stacker” (a derogatory term for an army logistician) Nitsch would know about special forces.

Nitsch encountered further press criticism in 2012 when, as the army’s director of manning, he was tasked with making 7,000 military personnel redundant. The Telegraph said he “infuriated troops” by suggesting they apply for specialist RAF and Royal Navy jobs.

But he is proud 88 per cent of those redundancies were voluntary. He was later awarded a CBE for ‘services to the Army Redundancy programme”, which he found “bizarre”.

Opening combat to women

Another proud moment was “reversing 300 years of history” by allowing women to join the infantry when he was the army’s HR director. This paved the way for women to join combat roles in other military services.

Upon leaving the army in 2018, Nitsch served just 18 hours – “the shortest time ever” – as a member of Ofqual’s board. He was interviewed by schools minister Nick Gibb and appointed while also applying for the then-Institute for Apprenticeships (IfA) job. Nitsch says “the roof fell in” when he told Ofqual’s then chair Roger Taylor about his IfATE role, due to the conflict of interest.

Culture shock

Having had the grim task of axing military staff, he welcomed the opportunity to grow an organisation for the first time in his career.

Nitsch was the 86^th person to join IfA. It later took on technical education, became IfATE and grew to 300 staff.

His biggest regret (he says with humour”) is “not solving the level-two business admin problem” which people often mention to him.

A big challenge IfATE faced that now faces Skills England is ensuring skills keep pace with rapid industry advancements. Nitsch initially advocated tackling the problem by predicting the future and then training people to be ready for it.

He now believes “we need to focus on how we condition people to respond to change”.

This means “educating people to self-learn and “embrace” change by “hunting out new things in their sector” and to “see lifelong learning as a really positive thing”.

He questions whether enough investment is going into the “soft skills that allow people to self-learn”, rather than telling them what to learn.

Nitsch’s FAB life

Nitsch saw joining FAB as the “logical next step” in his “journey of contributing to the development of technical education”.

He believes the awarding and assessment sector is “not as well understood or regarded as they could be” and wants to “grow the organisation, raise the profile of the sector and boost the training offer for members”.

Nitsch also wants FAB to do more research and develop data to explain which assessment methods work best or “why independent end-point assessment is better.”

He says while there is lots of research in the sector, “it’s not well joined up or communicated”. FAB recently appointed a policy director to lead this work.

This will be “the rubber on the road” in driving FAB forward. Yet his mission remains the same: to “improve the development of technical education”.

He adds: “That’s mobilised me hugely, and I’ve found it intensely rewarding. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”