Celebrate success and achievement

Simon Bartley, Chief Executive of UK Skills

There is an enormous field of debate out there about what employers want when it comes to skills and training. The simple way to find out is to listen to them, but how can employers communicate their requirements in the most effective way? The best ways are for them to use the variety of mechanisms, including Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) and trade associations, that exist to listen to and represent the interests of employers and, of course, to directly contact organisations such as UK Skills on how they want to engage.

Supporting employers

One of UK Skills’ key objectives is to support employers in their drive for a more highly skilled and productive workforce. Employers can communicate how they would like to work with us in a number of ways – we hold numerous events and meetings across the UK with employers present. These range from judging panels and workshops for our National Training Awards to business breakfasts for WorldSkills London 2011. We also have dedicated sector-based representatives in our Competitions Unit who are charged with listening to employers in order to develop a competitions framework that truly meets their needs.

Celebrating success

Having worked with hundreds of employers over the years, I think it true to say one of the things employers really want is to celebrate their success and showcase their achievements. One of the many ways in which they can do this is to enter our National Training Awards or enter their employees in our skills competitions. In the last year alone we’ve had more than 500 entrants to the National Training Awards and around 3,000 entrants to our network of skills competitions. We would like to hear from more employers about how they see themselves getting involved with both our awards and competitions going forward.
Another crucial thing employers want is consistent and timely information on training, but we all know that a huge volume of information about training currently exists. Increasingly, employers can get information through the Sector Skills Council network, but they can also get this through working with trade associations, the Train to Gain franchise, local skills brokers and regional skills partnerships. I believe Sector Skills Councils are working well to meet the needs of employers. Whilst they do need to be tweaked in the re-licensing process, they ought to be left alone for five years to give them an opportunity to bed down.

Funding model

Crucial to any employer is the funding model for skills training and development, which I believe is right in so far as it goes; funding for apprenticeships and advanced apprenticeships through the apprenticeship framework is good. However, there is an increasing demand for adult apprenticeships for individuals aged 14 to 25. There is also still a concern about the cost to employers – that it is still too high to make it good for them to train. A solution might be reimbursement to employers for the time apprentices spend at college during their apprenticeship or, put another way, reimbursement of wages for the time individuals are not working at their workplace. Development of Sector Skills Council agreements by individual SSCs are an enormous step forward and should be used to influence the debate around the funding model for skills. When completed we need to look at the individual bite-sized elements of training in the same way as the new occupational framework is looking at initialisation of qualifications and the funding thereof.

High-level skills

There has been some debate about where there is too much focus on Skills for Life at the expense of higher level skills. There does need to be an element of Skills for Life training at all levels of qualifications/skills development; however, my gut feeling is that it can be a decreasing proportion: Skills for Life at level 3 should be only 25 per cent of the Skills for Life at level 2.

A core goal for anyone working in the learning and skills sector is to promote the importance of skills development to employers, and I believe that this is best achieved through the use of case studies. Employers tend to listen more to their fellow employers than they ever do to government reason or diktat. At UK Skills we have an enormous bank of case studies that we use to promote the skills development message from winners of our National Training Awards through to profiles of WorldSkills Competitions. If we can persuade one committed employer to persuade two of their colleagues and then tell their colleagues, and so on, we will be in clover in no time at all.