terms of independent learning, critical thinking, curiosity and AI. We’ve already been exploring what might be the extra that an IoT student in Lancashire may do in addition to the main programme. We are forming our employer advisory groups as we speak.
NB: Skills are changing every year, so how do we change every year? We might be putting courses on this year that we won’t be in two years’ time for this IoT because they’re out of date. We’ve got to keep batting stuff back to the Department for Education about short skills programmes. And we’ve got to be adaptable.
MD: IoT is working on multiple levels, and one of them is about lighting those fires – that quote about if you want to get someone to build a boat don’t give them a hammer and nails, give them a love of the sea.
We understand now that employers need those young people who have that enthusiasm and that drive and that passion but also with up-to- date relevant technical skills.
More and more employers are telling us that people come out of university with outdated skills and have to be re-trained. This is where
come into the courses and the lessons.
We want to have that engagement. You’re our customer, come in tell us what we’re doing well, tell us what we’re not doing as well and tell us that some of it is really outdated, because I bet it is. If you take the curriculum off the shelf, some of it might not be very good.
JH: One of the biggest things you can do is try and push the model. We’re working with E-sports level three. It’s a great course. But when I first read the curriculum, it’s so broad, it’s so vast.
If you had the equivalent in football and you passed it and went to a football club, you would be managing the team and cutting the grass at the weekend. You’re probably running the burger van, banging a hat-trick in, saving a penalty and then if someone goes down injured, you’d be doing the physio as well. It’s everything.
At a strategic level it’s great to get new topics into the market but they look huge and they are off putting.
LD: A real positive for the IoT is the digital thread 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
the very essence and the concept of that higher technical learning really comes into its own.
TS: The biggest gap in the market I see, for say a web developer, which is essentially what we need to hire next, is that apprenticeship courses are far too broad for where we are.
They work in languages that have no relevance to what we are. They’re trying to cover gaming as a general language rather than what we would use commercially.
We’ve always found you can send someone on a course and they’re not wasting their time, because they’re still using different parts what they have learned, but it could be a lot more niched for what we need in terms of a digital marketing agency.
NB: We need you to come in and shape our curriculum with us. We all have advisory boards, vision groups, steering groups, whatever you want to call them. You need to
all the way through it. AI, automation, robotics.
MD: The T Level is a very focused, quite narrow course. It’s shaped by employers, but 20 per cent of it has to be industry relevant because that young person needs to be working in the industry for that percentage of their course.
That 20 per cent is an integral part of their course and their experience, where the employer is actually teaching them and training them.
We’re getting that real synergy between education and industry and the industry experience.
It’s really working. We’ve got young people who are getting this real specialist experience in industry in addition to the hardcore coding or engineering or whatever it might be.
And they’re going straight into jobs, into apprenticeships or full-time employment in industry and adding value straight away to those employers, because they understand
the business, they understand their job roles and they understand their role within that organisation. And then, in addition, they also understand that cultural fit.
NB: Some businesses have already been in and used the equipment we’ve bought through the IoT investment, with students getting involved. How good is it for those students to be actually working on those machines with a business? It’s that kind of approach that we need.
PD: We can come down to the college and send small groups to train on kit. It is another arm for our training department. Our apprentices who are now engineers introduced us to 3D printing. We’ve bought a 3D printer and it is saving us thousands. These young guys have all these ideas and we just need to harness it.
BS: I do like the idea of the pathways and I know a lot of universities do that. You go through a generalised couple of years and then the last two years you specialise. Having those specialised courses would massively benefit us.
SH: There is more work to be done in terms of telling young kids what the opportunities and different pathways are. There is a huge amount of choice. Part of the IoT is to simplify what we’ve got, making us easier to engage with and easier to understand what we’ve actually got to offer.
JH: I’d like to see some form of salary match scheme that allows experienced people in industry to come and teach for a couple of days, because we’ve got some absolute legends in Lancashire.
LD: If we can address that gap in skills in Lancashire and get at least to the national average, if not beyond, the difference it will make for businesses and for our residents, it’s transformational. I don’t use that word lightly.
MD: The IoT gives us the start of a system that needs to be sustainable and we need to find ways to make it sustainable.
Yes, we have invested a lot of money in equipment, and that’s fantastic for our learners and it’s fantastic for the businesses who are using it.
However, it will become obsolete very quickly and we need that constant dialogue to inform us about the next thing we’re going to need.
SH: We want to work with as many people as we can, because the more employers we get the more we can shape the curriculum and those modular courses. We can’t do it on our own, it is a partnership.
LANCASHIREBUSINES SV
IEW.CO.UK
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