So we went out with YouGov to over 2,000 businesses of all size and shapes
and asked them what are the skills your workforce needs to meet the challenges of the future.
And what came back gets around the sort of, the short-term answer
you know when we speak to TikTok they say quite literally
that they don't know the problem they're going to be working on in the next four months
so that's quite sobering when you talk about skills
you have to start to redefine what skills are a little bit
so in what came back from 2,000 businesses were things like problem solving,
critical thinking, communication so that you can work together across subject areas
digital competency, analysis but also adaptability and resilience.
So if you start to think about skills in that way
you can get around the short-term problem of you know what are the skills we need now,
and by the time we respond to that you know those skills will have moved on to some other skills
and to really start to educate people to be able to
almost continually and constantly reskill and upskill
and when we get, I hope I have the opportunity later to talk about it,
to the University we are going to be doing that in the curriculum now.
That is the response to the challenge.
So there are specific technical skills you need but there's also a broader
how you run businesses, how you scale up,
that are also necessary to to be taught?
Yes that's right, there's the subject competence, the technical competence
but also these other skills that surround it.
Thank you very much.
Thank you and it sounds like what you're really asking for is
a whole new approach to the way we educate people
moving away from functions to sort of actual sort of problem solving?
Yes expanding the notion of skills and having education rise to that challenge, yes.
What specifically must the government do urgently as well as for the long term?
There's a couple of good initiatives, the lifelong learning entitlement
if that could be designed to facilitate this continuous reskilling that would be a win,
if we could fix the apprenticeship levy that would be a win
and I I think the Creative Industries Council is a fantastic model
that sits between the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS)
but the problem, and I'll be quite blunt here,
you know education and business policy are completely siloed
so the Higher Education Minister needs a seat in BEIS
you know BEIS is where the discussions about the future world of work are happening,
the Higher Education Minister doesn't have any part in those conversations.
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) distributes a billion pounds a year to universities
and to support innovation in business, the Higher Education Minister has no say in that distribution.
So who's going to deliver the skills?
The skills are going to be delivered by further education (FE) and higher education (HE)
and they are not at the table when these conversations are being had.
The Office for Students (OfS) also needs to understand the future world of work
they're using metrics for the quality of courses
and the quality of graduate outputs which are,
which completely ignore entrepreneurism completely ignore startups which are really,
you can only really hit through gradual employment schemes
so that's a really old-fashioned idea of what work is going to be like,
it's not the future of work so all of those things
do impact on what the educational sphere will offer
because those are all judging you know how well we're doing
so I think there needs to be quite a bit more of a think and
and get the conversation about industry and business much more into the higher education sphere.
It does seem that a lot of what we're talking about today is driving innovation in the economy isn't it
and a lot of that is being done at least in the beginning by higher and further education
so it seems sort of obvious to put those two things together.
I mean my university we're working really closely with industry
that report is the voice of industry
and we're going to turn the whole University on its head to deliver that
so there are universities, mine is not the only one by any means
that are working very very closely with industry to try and deliver what it says it needs.