How to put employer data at the heart of Skills for Jobs in FE colleges
The introduction of ‘Skills for Jobs’ last year means that colleges now need to reach out to businesses at a new level. As a data broker we can help FE colleges and other providers with reliable lists to make sure they find the right contacts and build strong relationships
The Skills for Jobs conundrum
There is a highly significant statement in the executive summary of the Government-issued Skills for Jobs: Lifelong Learning for Opportunity and Growth white paper. When I read it, I could almost hear the heartfelt sigh of frustration from colleges up and down the country. It seems at first glance to be a simple enough bullet point and it states that one of the aims of the initiative is:
‘Putting employers at the heart of the system so that education and training leads to jobs that can improve productivity and fill skills gaps’
There seems to be a very positive move here. Ensuring that the offering from our colleges meets the needs of business is a commendable goal. However, the problem is not in the intent, it is in the how.
Outreach to create synergy
One key area that comes through in the white paper is the belief that there needs to be more synergy between the needs of the business community and the training and development provided by colleges. Once again, this is a great idea in principle and again here there is a practicality problem. The target businesses, for many very reasonable reasons, are not likely to have the same agenda as the education providers. The two areas seem to have synergy of intention. Businesses want appropriately trained and skilled potential employees and colleges want to appropriately upskill that same group but there is a gap to be bridged. That gap is one of creating the relationships and channels needed to meet the requirements of Skills for Jobs. A link needs to be made. Business is, at the risk of stating the obvious, busy doing business. That means it is likely to be down to the FE colleges to create these links. To do that they will need to know who and where those employers are. In short, they will need data.
How a Data Broker can help with Skills for Jobs
The modern Higher Education college is data-hungrymarketing and need to be able to reach out on several levels. At one end of the scale a college needs to meet the information needs of a continually refreshing group of potential learners. Ensuring that possible new students are aware of the courses on offer and the facilities of the college has traditionally been the main focus of outreach and college marketing for many educational establishments. We provide highly focused data lists to colleges around the UK and these help them ensure that their message hits exactly the right target and gets results. See our recent blog ‘personalised Data for Higher Education’ For a good example of this in action.
We also have many FE colleges asking us for filtered, focused and accurate data to help reach out to the local business community. We are working with them to create lists of businesses for the apprentice provision and of course, the all-important work experience and work placements that are a vital part of the learner experience on many courses. As Skills for Jobs begins to embed a lot of colleges are now also working with us to us to widen the scope of their data to facilitate building bridges beyond specific placements. To bring the vision of ‘Putting employers at the heart of the system’ to life requires that colleges reach out to a wider, and often new, set of employers and businesspeople. To meet the intention that ‘higher education and training leads to jobs that can improve productivity and fill skills gaps’ requires a new level of understanding between local industry and the local colleges that feed it. That can only be achieved if colleges are able to bridge the data gap and talk to the right people in the right businesses.
All this begins with having the right data list.
We can help. Call us and we will talk through where you want to go with Skills for Jobs so that we can find you the right solution to your data needs.
