Setting training sights higher

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Higher and degree apprenticeships are being heralded as key to helping businesses boost their productivity and drive innovation.

Companies across Lancashire are being urged to play their part in shaping the new training landscape emerging.

Raising skills is a vital part of the government’s emerging industrial strategy, a gathering of business leaders, academics and further education professionals at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) was told.

Speaking at the UCLan degree apprenticeships event, held at The Media Factory in Preston, the Dean of Lancashire Business School Dharma Kovvuri told business leaders: “This is a real investment opportunity to develop and shape your workforce.”

He said higher and degree apprenticeships would make it easier for them to attract and retain staff, give more flexibility in how companies delivered their training and was a chance for them to “shape the training” to meet their direct requirements.

He also revealed that UCLan was hard at work developing a number of wideranging degree apprenticeships in partnership with businesses.

Degree apprenticeships combine a blend of technical knowledge, on the job experience and business skills.

Dharma explained: “The Government is making a real push around degree apprenticeships; it wants to increase the number from around half a million a year at the moment to three million starts overall by 2020.”

He added that the aim was to “raise the productivity and innovation of businesses” and to drive high level skills to tackle the underperforming UK’s productivity gap.

Lynne Livesey, Deputy Vice Chancellor at UCLan and a member of the Lancashire Enterprise Partnership (LEP) Skills and Employment Board, stressed that the skills gap in the North West was wider than other parts of the country.

Lynne urged businesses paying the new apprenticeship levy to use the funding to make sure they were competitive and as a way of growing and retaining talent to meet the needs of industry in the future. And she added: “This is about employers designing and inputting what they want.”

The event also heard from Michael Conlon, chairman of Conlon Construction. He said degree apprenticeships undertaken by his staff trained them for their roles in the business, but they also got a “commercial edge” from being on the job as well as studying.

He was taking part in a panel discussion that also included Dharma and Lynne as well as Helen Jones, leadership and development manager at UCLan and Melissa Conlon, commercial manager at Lancashire-based software development company Magma Digital. Melissa said her industry had a “massive skills shortage” with many more software engineers needed. She added: “We very much want to get involved and influence the curriculum.”

The event was chaired by Lancashire Business View publisher Richard Slater and the magazine was a media partner. See the full event review and photos in edition 74.