David Gregson, strategic partnerships manager, Lancaster University
Over the last decade or so we’ve got a lot more aligned to working with industry. Like all the North West universities we do work closely with businesses.
Certainly, through partnerships with Further Education, we are seeing real growth to sustain that knowledge. A good example of that is the Institute of Technology.
It is going to pull through an awful lot of new apprentices that will directly impact on the skills shortage and that will be done through working with the Further Education partners and Higher Education, so it is an interesting proposition.
We have school outreach teams going in at sixth form level and looking to help guide people in terms of specific careers.
University is a lot different now. From day one on campus students are guided, they are supported. Everybody wants work experience, so we do an awful lot these days to help those young people through. It is all about setting aspirations for young people.
At Lancaster over the last five years, we’ve seen the numbers on computer science, engineering and all those STEM subject courses go up every year and that sends out a powerful message.
Andy Walker, head of business growth and innovation, Lancashire County Council and LEP
There seem to be a lot of skills initiatives and some well-established pathways like apprenticeships which really work well.
So, it’s choosing
where we invest and making sure those things are scalable, because if you put all the initiatives that we’ve got on top of one another, we do need to be radical and to be operating that scale around this agenda.
The fact we have core employers like BAE Systems and local young people see that as a really high-quality route is a great thing, but Lancashire needs to be more ambitious and look to draw more people in, because the skills base that we’ve got at the moment isn’t enough.
The ways you do that are by bringing more people into the patch but also through more routes into the sector, not just a pathway where you start with young people at 16.
Lancashire is the most dependent regional economy on aerospace. We have the highest proportion of people working in it, the wider manufacturing sector and the supply chain that feeds into it. So as a driver of the economy it is second to none.
You can’t understate the importance of it getting what it needs to grow, chiefly skills and people.
Sophie Harker, assistant chief engineer of electric products, BAE Systems
The more you work in aerospace, the more you work in manufacturing, the more excited by it you are, because it’s complicated, it’s interesting, you want to learn more, and you will only ever know a very small amount of a very complicated thing.
Because of that the opportunities to keep learning and get inspired by what you’re doing are endless. It is being able to say to people, ‘You will never know it all, but you can know a lot and continue learning. You can be a specialist if you want, but you don’t have to be.’
We need people that move around, do different things and are willing to learn about different things, gain different skills.
One of the things I’ve found always leaves a mark is that I say to people, ‘I can leave a legacy’. I get to work on things that in 100 years’ time people will still be able to see.
It’s not something I’m doing for the next year, it’s something I’m doing for the future, particularly what I do now in sustainability, looking at electric aviation and how we can make a genuine impact on the world. It’s hard not to be excited by that.
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