We work with sector skills councils and professional engineering institutions to develop long-term strategies for addressing particular skills needs.
Our Whole-Life Skills tool enables our clients to view as one integrated system the many factors and processes that influence careers choices and skills development in their sectors of industry. From this position of greater clarity we are able to work with clients to identify and develop specific interventions targeted at addressing skills gaps.
For instance, as part of a commission for ECITB we investigated we mapped the various engineering-themed careers advice and teaching resources available to students and mapped these to the Whole-Life Skills diagram. Presented in this way, it clear that when compared to physics, there is a distinct lack of influencing factors and attractors visible at KS3 and KS4 to pull young people towards engineering.
Based on these observations we recommended the development of a suite of energy-themed teaching resources that would enable teachers to use examples from the engineering sector to teaching key parts of the science and maths curriculum in schools.
The output of skills strategy commissions, such as work we’ve carried for organisations including CITB, Cogent, ECITB, ICE and IStructE, is typically a concise report providing our recommendations together with fully costed proposals for further strategic interventions, leaving our clients in a stronger position to bid for the funds to implement their preferred strategies.