After several months of hard work, two weeks ago we submitted the final draft of the Greater Manchester Local Skills Improvement Plan to the Department for Education (DfE) for approval.
Now that’s probably not the most exciting thing you’ll read today, but it should be, and what comes next will be fundamental to you if you are looking to recruit, upskill staff or have any interest whatsoever in skills development, either in your business or for yourself.
As a quick recap, Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs) are brand new plans rolled out by government across England, that are tasked to business representative organisations, like us, to write. They should reflect which changes are needed in local areas around technical skills provision so that local labour market needs are better met. In other words, if you’re in business and struggling to find staff with the right skills needs then this is the starting point to getting this sorted.
The Chamber won the contract to deliver this for Greater Manchester, and for the last 7 months myself and the team here have worked with a huge range of stakeholders and businesses across GM to find out more about the recruitment problems and skills shortages businesses are experiencing. We've achieved this through analysing data gathered from 3,000 survey responses and by conducting over 100 interviews with individuals representing many different sectors across GM. Based on this information and numerous other sources of data and intelligence, we've identified skills priorities for key sectors and local areas, and produced a set of recommendations with key actions that need to be undertaken to start to rectify the problem areas.
The plan is currently with DfE for approval, so we can’t share it just yet.... but we can give you some headlines:
We’ve identified a list of the most in-demand occupations in critical sectors like construction, engineering, health and social care, logistics and hospitality. We know that some sectors struggle to recruit staff through labour shortages as well as skills gaps, but we have managed to drill this down to key occupations across those key sectors - the occupations most in demand now and needed for the future.
We know where the big growth opportunities will come in the future, through projects like Atom Valley in the north of GM, and across other growth areas in the rest of the city region covering all 10 local authority areas.
We’ve worked closely with the local colleges in GM to look at current provision and highlight recommendations for future provision where it is needed.
There are fundamental issues around basic IT and digital skills – not just high-end coding and software developers - but basic everyday office tasks using Excel, Word and Outlook. Coupled with this are real problems around essential numeracy and literacy – staff unable to read operating instructions, for example. There are big gaps around leadership and management skills and a broad range of basic ‘soft’ skills or personal skills specific to workplaces and needed for staff to ‘do their job’. Finally, with increasing emphasis on net zero and sustainable skills, this is a huge area that is vastly underdeveloped as regards definitive skill sets and qualifications. People know what they need to do, but often not how to do it.
None of this is new - it isn’t ground breaking - but, for the first time we have a firm grasp of this, backed up by a mountain of supporting data.
So what now?
Well, as I said, we haven’t been working alone on this and key partners have been the colleges in GM and also the GM Combined Authority, who, over the next few months, will start to put in place activity, led and influenced by what employers have told us in the LSIP.
Remember when the Mayor launched his vision for an Integrated Technical Education City Region, and his ideas for a new MBacc designed to help young people make the right choices at 14 about what career paths they should take in the future? All that has come about through the new Devolution Deal launched in the Spring Budget, but it will be influenced by the LSIP. The colleges in GM all have a fundamental part to play, and do so already, engaging with employers to help design courses and training to meet skills needs. There will be new funding available over the coming months to help start to deliver this to a wider group of businesses in, potentially, new ways, again based on information within the LSIP, identifying the priorities for business and what is needed urgently.
But it isn’t just about providers responding to this. We have also identified that there needs to be a step-change in how employers view skills development in their workforce – barriers around cost and time away from the job impact on this - as well as encouraging more business engagement with education and providers. The pace of change can be bewildering in some sectors with skills quickly becoming past their 'best before' date. To get around this, it needs a true partnership between employers and providers to make sure that what is being taught matches current developments and is also future-proofed as best it can be.
So, the LSIP isn’t just another skills report that will sit somewhere on a shelf - it is a fundamental part of how skills will be delivered in GM in the future, in a more responsive and effective way, and it will also be updated by ongoing survey work and interviews to make sure it reflects current demands.
We will be working on the next part of the LSIP through to March 2025 and we will be asking for evidence from employers right the way through. So, if you’ve already completed a survey or been interviewed, a huge "thank you." If not, then look out for your chance to take part in the coming weeks.
And look out as well for our reports on what our work has told us so far. We may not be able to release the plan just yet, but we must make sure that our findings and priorities are put to use. We can’t hang around when it comes to skills, and we are in the best position ever to start to use what employers have told us to work with stakeholders and partners to make sure changes are made, and some of these long-standing, familiar problems start to get sorted.
If you'd like to find out more about the GM LSIP, or have any queries about the project, please contact the team via gmlsip@gmchamber.co.uk.
Image: Chris Fletcher, Policy Director at Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce and Contract Director for the GM Local Skills Improvement Plan.