26 . Glasgow Business March/April 2014
HOW TO GET YOUNG PEOPLE INTO WORK
Group is helping to boost youth employment opportunities T
he Glasgow Youth Employment Advisory Group has produced key recommendations aimed
at boosting the number of young Glaswegians in work and improving the city region’s competitiveness. Te group, which was
facilitated by Glasgow Chamber of Commerce and made up of the city region’s 15 biggest employers, set out recommendations aimed at transforming the current picture in which too few young people get work and too oſten businesses miss out on an important source of employees. On youth employment
services, it recommended that: » Support programmes should be refocused to address youth employment at a wider structural level, with funding being redistributed to reflect this. Members of the action group
and other speakers at an event at St Mungo’s Museum to launch the report and discuss its findings referred to the patchy nature of funding for youth employment programmes. David Scot, of the Arnold Clark Group’s GTG Training, referred to the “current lotery of funding”. » A single point of information for employers looking to recruit young people should be developed. Tis would identify and feature information on the
various ways employers can be supported to train, recruit and retain young people within their businesses. Tis idea of a ‘one-stop shop’
for information for employers was highlighted repeatedly as a necessity at the report launch. On education and businesses it
recommended: »Work by Glasgow City Council Education Services and Glasgow Chamber of Commerce to create a framework for business involvement in schools. Work on this had already
begun before the action group had completed its discussions. Its aims include having at least one business sponsor for each of the 29 secondary schools in the city. It would also include creating
significant new opportunities for specialist employment-focused learning from secondary years four to six. » Sector specific ‘knowledge centres of excellence’ should be created in schools across the city, focused on employment growth sub-sectors. Tese would provide in-depth sector-based learning to
complement subject learning delivered in schools. »Work should be done to establish the best model for work-based learning, which would draw on both traditional further and higher education ways of doing things. A new model for achieving this
is well established in Switzerland, the action group said, and is being trialled in England. Te action group said that this approach and a number of others should be tried to see what works best in a Scotish context. » A city-wide strategy should be developed for increasing the effectiveness, flexibility and scope of paid and unpaid work experience programmes. Te action group was struck by
the fact that all the young people they talked to, whether graduates or those looking for their first job post-school, mentioned work experience as important. » A high-profile mentoring scheme should be developed across the business community and public sector to create a bank of employer mentors. One stakeholder should
“The group was struck by the fact that all the young people they talked to mentioned work experience as important”
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