62 DEBATE
Ben Savage
David Hammond
Paul Daughtry
Linda Dean
Morag Davis
Neil Burrows
Jamie Hughes Continued from Page 61
At the beginning we engaged with businesses asking what skills were needed. Three years down the line those skills are changing. We have revisited, revisited and revisited.
We are now collaborating as colleges; we share in those discussions. So if I know a business needs some skills from an IoT perspective that we can’t provide we’re passing them on, and that’s how it should be.
DH: Our business grew through Lancaster University and I was able to bring interns in with so much energy and skills. It helped bring skills into the business and also helped them develop.
Today we find it difficult to recruit people with energy. I want to bring young people into our business, they could still be going through education. I want them on an internship, learning all sorts of skills. Get them in to help on the R&D side. And if it works out for them and it works out for us, then great, we’ve got jobs for them.
PD: We’re looking for people that are excited about the industry, that want to become engineers. We need young people and we need more software people. Young people are very much software led anyway, they’re very technical from the beginning.
The young people that come in and learn these new skills take us to the next level. Boohoo is a massive software company and the young person may come in as an engineer and go out as a software developer.
All this new kit and equipment, it will excite these young people from a young age. They will know that if you want to be an engineer you don’t have to go down the traditional route
BS: We manufacture and convert plant machinery for rail use. Not a lot of the colleges teach what we do. Half of our shop floor workforce are either apprentices or trainees. We do a lot of in-house training.
We have to change our approach in terms of creating development and succession plans. The difficulty we have is bringing people in with the skills we need, so we are always looking for transferable skills we can then mould specifically into what we want.
Technology also means we are going to have to change the way we operate, which also changes the way we look at the kind of engineers we want to bring in.
You can teach anyone to pick up a spanner but it’s very difficult to teach someone how to be intuitive and question and think for themselves, and to challenge.
What challenges is the IoT looking to meet?
NB: If you have skill shortages, then the IoT is here to support. At Burnley College we’re putting our 16-and-17-year-olds into our IoT to get that ‘excitement’ bit. They’ve got to do the traditional stuff but we’re getting them to use the kit and equipment so they can progress.
SH: If you take engineering, it is so vast. A lot of kids will say ‘I want to go into engineering’ but they don’t really now what it means. It’s bringing those opportunities to life, to show that there are digital opportunities, there’s software. We need to inspire those young people; they need to see it in real life by visiting employers and by employers coming in to speak to them.
That’s where we can start to get young people
really excited about the career pathways they’ve got and that is a big part of what we have to do. And that’s why it’s so important that we have that partnership with employers.
JH: One of our biggest challenges is the fact that our skills shortages can appear overnight. I work for a company that does digital marketing in the computer game space and E-sports. It’s incredibly fast moving.
What can be incredibly relevant one day is gone the next, it moves very, very quickly. The biggest thing we need is almost that ‘concept of life education’, that it continues to evolve.
Over the course of a two or three-year course, what was relevant in the first year is yesterday’s chip paper three years on. It’s that constant engagement with industry that is needed, because it is literally live education.
We rarely recruit straight out of university or college. We tend to recruit people who have had their fires lit by college and university and have gone out and done their own things.
We pick the people who are running great social media channels or are creating content and running E-sports events. They are not getting paid but they’ve learned those skills in college. They’re keen and doing it anyway and then we find them, we pay them and mould them.
We can teach people how to write social media copy, how to do paperclip, social media marketing. What we can’t teach is the energy to go, ‘Oh, I like that, that’s interesting, how can I have a play with it? How can I create something from it?’
LD: There are some real key takeaways here in
Sarah Hall
Tom Smith
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