Despite the UK having near-record levels of youth unemployment, many of our best small businesses are held back by major skills shortages in key growth sectors. Tackling this mismatch, with an expansion of modern apprenticeships, needs to be at the heart of Labour’s growth plan if we are to allow our growth sectors to compete internationally.
Removing barriers in tax, regulation, finance, and infrastructure – both physical and digital – can help employers to grow and create jobs. But as I have travelled around the country in recent months for my growth review, it is skills which has consistently been top of the agenda for most businesses.
More than half of the businesses which I have surveyed, via events and an online survey, have cited skills as their main barrier to growth. One small manufacturer told me that the average age of their workforce was over 60, as they couldn’t find the engineering specialists they needed.
This is backed up by a report by City and Guilds, which found that around three-quarters of employers in digital, IT, engineering and manufacturing cited skills shortages. And a survey of 90,000 employers out today from the UK Commission on Employment and Skills found that their ‘skills shortage vacancies’ – which occur when employers cannot find people with the right skills and qualifications to do the job – have nearly doubled in the past four years to around 125,000.
It is innovative, high-growth businesses which are suffering most when it comes to finding the talent they need. As NESTA has shown, just six per cent of UK businesses with the highest growth rates generated half of the new jobs between 2002 and 2008, and innovation was a key source of their growth.
These businesses create exactly the sorts of well-paid jobs which we want to encourage, but many have struggled to recruit, particularly for technical roles. Despite the vacancies for these high-quality jobs, 920,000 young people are still out of work, of which more than a quarter have been looking for work for more than a year.
Apprenticeships offer the best route to matching our young people to these growth sectors. They provide the technical skills which so many employers are craving. And, by combining a job with training, they can better align what is being learned to the needs of employers.
But most employers don’t provide apprenticeships and take-up is particularly low in the same high-growth industries which have issues recruiting for technical roles. More than half of apprenticeships are in just six of the 165 apprenticeship frameworks which are on offer.
We need to give employers and young people more confidence in apprenticeships by making sure that qualifications and training have credibility in the marketplace. Employers need more of a say in the way qualifications and training are designed. Schools need to do more to promote apprenticeships to young people. And our cities and regions should have more influence over the way funding is distributed. Only then will Britain have the skills, and the growth, that it deserves.
———————————————————
Andrew Adonis is chair of Progress and is conducting a growth review. He tweets @Andrew_Adonis
———————————————————
Employer Engagement MUST be at the heart of developing innovative policies and practices that motivate employer engagement with skilled job seekers. This ‘bridging the gap’ is vital to people, community and economic recovery.
But, where are the ‘joined-up’ thinkers in government.. or in opposition who are willing to come into the heart of our communities and to establish this front? Talk is good. Action needs to follow… immediately. In times of hardship.. and austerity, leadership in needed to inspire and strengthen its team members towards striving at the type of goals I have mentioned above. If it is fundamental to ‘bridge the gap’ between employers and job seekers, surely it is also fundamental for policy-makers to engage in their masses with people in the community by way of events.
It is clear that the Coalition focus on austerity has also increased a psychological depression amid an economical collapse. Is it not therefore right that a community tsar gathers a team of enthusiastic individuals and holds events in the communities aimed at Listening, Engaging and Empowering people towards goals, inclusive of Council Leaders, Work Programme practitioners… etc? Where is this movement that stands at the door of No.10 with the results of its ‘findings’, following such a community team objective?
Counteractive policies that Inspire minds towards progressive attitudes – whether that be employers, service deliverers or job seekers. Isn’t this the answer?
It would really help if you could define what you mean by “apprenticeship” otherwise pretty well any old on-job training will do. We need to train for adaptability and flexibility for the future work force as most of today’s jobs will vanish over the course of time and most of the jobs of the future remain unforeseen. Have a look at the design of YTS 30 years ago – if we could get that far, it would mark monumental progress away from current empty rhetoric.