Globally competitive and locally responsive?

Today we’re launching a call for evidence to help inform the work of the Skills Taskforce for Global Britain, The Taskforce will give recommendations on how we can help make the UK a global leader in using high-quality technical skills to help secure foreign investment, helping create jobs and growth in nations and regions across the whole of the UK.

The Call for Evidence centres on five key themes:
• how important are skills to international investors?
• which skills do investors need?
• how quickly can we respond to investors’ skills needs?
• which regions/nations are best at responding to investors’ skills needs?
• how does the UK’s skills pipeline compare with other countries in attracting investors?

Responses by completion of a survey are invited from educators, training providers, investment promotion agencies and business.

The Skills Taskforce is chaired by John Cridland CBE, former Director General of the CBI and Chairman of the Home Group and is made up of 12 members with experience of attracting foreign investment in industry, within Local Enterprise Partnerships, delivering skills in practice and policy delivery at the highest levels throughout all regions. The professional services firm EY, whose Annual Attractiveness Survey has shown over successive years that access to high-quality skills is a key concern for international firms when choosing whether to locate or expand in the UK, is a founding member. Read more about the Taskforce.

Our own work including the recent research we commissioned carried out by the Learning & Work Institute called, Disconnected: exploring the digital skills gap, highlights gaps in digital skills provision. This alone has the potential to seriously impede UK performance across all internationally-traded sectors such as engineering, advanced manufacturing, clean tech, digital and life sciences. Our benchmarking of skills internationally tells us that the UK could be performing better in technical education and this needs addressing urgently if we are to compete for inward investment against countries such as Singapore, France, Australia and Ireland.

If you or your organisation has experience in working in skills education and training, international investment attraction; or education and employer co-working then please play your part in helping position the UK as a world-class skills economy, by completing the questionnaire: