What strikes me about the Post-16 Skills & Education Act is that there is a lot of focus on young people progressing through the education system who hopefully will at some point enter the construction, engineering and/or manufacturing industry workforce.
My concern is that a lot of investment is going into educating these youngsters, only for them to come into the industry and leave shortly thereafter. I say this because, where we do see young people coming out of college into the sector, they often struggle to adapt to the demands of work on the ground. Much of what they are exposed to within education is theory-based and it seems easy for them to shy away from a hard day’s work once they come out into the workplace. We must be sure that these youngsters know what they are getting themselves into and are armed with that practical experience.
More broadly, more needs to be done to expose young people to the real opportunities these industries provide. Many young people today go through school where there is such an emphasis on academia. This breeds negative perceptions toward industries that are manual labour heavy such as construction, engineering and manufacturing. Yet, these sectors are more lucrative than many young people realise and are great places to earn a living, but this message is not getting across to young people anywhere near enough.
Elsewhere in the Act, the government’s idea to offer adults across the country the opportunity to retrain through the Lifetime Skills Guarantee is a major positive. This helps adults gain in-demand skills and enhance their prospects in industries like ours that need skills. Furthermore, I feel in terms of retention, adults are far more likely to remain in roles following training than young people are simply because of their greater life experience and difference in attitude. What will be key here is the scale of take-up: history shows that the amount of people signing up to these sorts of loan schemes is below the benchmark and ministers need to make this as non-prohibitive as possible to maximise the number of adults coming through. There is major potential for this demographic to plug the skills shortages we are currently seeing, and they need to be given proper attention in all of this.
I was also pleased to see that the government is seeking to realign the skills system around the needs of employers, which will ensure that people are trained in industries which are suffering from skills shortages now and in the future. However, it must be said that the needs of employers have remained the same for the last two decades and as much as the government wants employers and the education sector to collaborate on this, what industry is asking for has always been different to what the Department for Education has produced in the past. Now is the time when education needs to listen so that we can truly work together to come up with viable solutions.
Tradeforce Gas & Heating are more than willing to abide by and help this process as much as possible to ensure the end goals are met. Industry, education and government must support each other in overcoming this issue.
Key Points:
• The perception of labour-intensive industries such as ours among young people is a major driver of the skills shortfall.
• More concerted efforts must be made to change the attitudes of young people.
• The government’s focus on offering the adult workforce an opportunity to retrain in this Act is positive but take-up is crucial.
• The plan to put employers at the heart of the post-16 skills system via local skills improvement plans must be followed through properly.
This article originally appeared in The Leaders Council’s special report on ‘The Impact of the Skills & Post-16 Education Act on the Construction, Engineering & Manufacturing sectors’, published on July 4, 2022. Read the full special report here.
Photo by Marcel Strauß on Unsplash
