Skills debate: Attitude over aptitude

With our partners D&M Creative and Blackpool and the Fylde College, we convened an expert panel of business leaders at Hatfields Jaguar Land Rover in Preston to discuss what employers want from recruits, lifelong skills and how AI is changing the way they do business.

Participants:

Chris Brown, Brown & Co; Zowi Whittaker, Fox Group; Edd Draper, Calico Group; Jen Briggs, James' Places; Gary Alker, Prolight Concepts; Morgan Rothwell, D&M Creative; Paul Colman-Smith, Hatfields Jaguar Land Rover; Sarah Hall, B&FC Group for Business.

Attitude, aptitude and technical skills: What are employers really looking for today, and how has that changed?

SH: What employers want is people who have those soft skills. They can problem solve, they communicate well, they have a really good attitude to work. Lots of employers need skilled staff and are struggling to find those experienced people. The speed of technology and how fast it is changing means employees need to keep up with that, so the learning journey doesn't just stop when you leave education.

You also don't want everybody with a degree level qualification, because businesses need those level two and level three roles fulfilling, despite what is said about AI, that it's going to take entry level jobs.

JB: Within James' Places, we have 40 to 50 different roles and we always say we want to educate generations of the future, which is why it's really key we have relationships with colleges and training providers, because we want to show people there are so many opportunities. One of the things we've talked about with some of our training providers is it can be frustrating because people say, ‘it's just cleaners’, or ‘they're just pouring a pint’. But actually, it's customer service that goes behind it. It's learning about those pints. It's learning about the products. It's doing the menu tasting. There are so many aspects to a hospitality role.

ZW: We face those same problems. There are misconceptions about what working in construction is, to the extent where we've created a two sided leaflet that lists every job role in our business. It's then educating the educators and parents. Not everyone is a bricklayer. There are so many more opportunities. Parents don't see construction as a good career, but a lot of these so called low skill roles command very good wages.

Not everyone is made to go to university, so we should be celebrating those entry level jobs because entry level doesn't mean it's unskilled or it's not paid well.

SH: We need to work with businesses, because we need to keep what we're teaching to students relevant. We have developed apprenticeships that businesses couldn't find in the north west. But it's not always about a certificate. It might be that you can come to us if you need a short, flexible programme to upskill your existing staff.

PCS: We have been redefining our talent pool over the last five years and we have collaborated with some of the talent review assessors, looking at hiring for tomorrow, not for yesterday. We are looking for people who have learning agility, potential, collaboration skills, even if they don’t have experience.

It's attitude first, then aptitude, then technical experience. And there are three ingredients I look for in anybody: common sense, courtesy, and initiative.

We don't look at any CVs when we interview people. All I want to talk to them about is their life experience. If I got your mum and dad in now, what are they going to say about you? In three months' time, what are we not going to like about you? Tell us now. Because it will come out. So we have those honest conversations.

ED: We launched a pathways programme and found that 77 per cent of our managers would be interested in taking an entry level person in. We are trying to support those managers and we've developed a 12 week induction where the talent development team and other colleagues in the business will support managers and give them all the aftercare to develop those soft skills. We can train them in the technical side later and get them qualifications. That will come.

With recruitment, though, we are doing more assessment days where candidates come in. We do a range of activities to get to know them as a person and we have a lot of colleagues in the room who are observing everything about them. We are looking for people who aren’t the finished article but have potential.

CB: We always hire on attitude and potential, because someone who's got the right attitude, you can teach them, you can train them to do anything, and we want to create mini entrepreneurs within the business so they can think and do things for themselves.

One of the things we don't talk about enough in this country is culture and that has to be the key. We looked at everything and at what actually should our culture be in terms of our core values and then we recruit based on whether people fit those core values.

SH: In order for young people to get that work experience and be work ready, they have to get placements with employers. You can't have a Saturday job until you're 16. So where do they get that experience from to become work ready? That's where the collaboration again comes, where they have some meaningful work placements with businesses.

GA: We have a range of departments and roles: engineers, cable manufacture, in house marketing, sales people out on the road, finance and purchasing. There is a varied skill set across the whole company. From a recruitment point of view, technical skills probably get you in the door for the interview. But we are looking at their attitude, their ability to learn and their communication skills.

If the employers aren't engaging with the colleges and the educators, we can't complain later and say there's not a workforce there for us to be able to employ. If I look at my team on finance, it's very much an 80/20 rule. If you have 20 per cent of the technical knowledge, then I can train you up with the rest of it.

MR: When I look at the last three people we have recruited, the combined age of those three people is about 58 or 59. But those three people were all recruited mainly on their attitude. We can teach them most of the things they need to know and, in our industry, we are working on things that didn't even exist 12 months ago, so I'm not going to be able to find somebody that specialises in ChatGPT advertising because it has only just started in the UK.

GA: The way things have changed in everyone's industry, it's almost as though you are having to unlearn and then learn something new. To me it's not just about young people, it's people my age as well, who are still having to be educated in how industries are changing and the skill sets which are needed.

AI, automation, and the future workforce: how are new technologies changing the skills organisations need, and how do these stretch across sectors?

JB: We need everyone to still be able to talk to customers, talk to suppliers, talk to people, build those relationships and yes, AI might be able to wheel drinks or food to a table, but it's that face to face welcome when somebody comes into a building that counts. I still believe a lot of things are done by a person, rather than through a computer or another resource.

SH: AI and digital literacy are going to affect every business, but at different levels. All employees are going to need a certain level of digital literacy and AI understanding. It is about making sure your workforce has those skills. How are you training them? How have you built that into your development plan for your people?

GA: To a certain extent, some people were embarrassed to admit they were using AI in the past. Now we are all on board with it. It's a tool to make you more efficient and get through things quicker. But it's still important to have a breadth of knowledge and the maturity to understand what's been given by that AI. It streamlines so many processes for me, but you need to be able to interpret it and to ask the right questions as well. It can't just be seen as a silver bullet that answers everything.

CB: We use a couple of pieces of AI kit, particularly for things like tax and technical stuff. We can put documents in and ask AI to analyse them. But even then it can get things wrong and you have to be able to spot that. A lot of young people expect us to be using AI. But you have to understand the output. We did a whole piece of work with our IT provider to do an AI readiness piece and a couple of things had slipped through the net, so we have had to create an AI policy now.

MR: There are so many people putting receipts and bank statements into ChatGPT for analysis, and you need to be really careful about what data you’re uploading.

PCS: The digital platform's been introduced to our business over the last two or three years, largely for reporting. All our phone calls are analysed, inbound and outbound, and keywords are introduced. It is used as a tool to support our team to develop. We also have AI looking at the percentage of calls coming in from different media and processing invoices.

ED: The biggest thing about AI is the time saving. The big question is what is happening with that extra time? Is it good quality interaction? Team meetings? Analysis? That is the key. We have a digital transformation agenda and digital influencers are coming together as a group. They are then going out creating good habits, educating and training.

ZW: AI is being fully embraced in our organisation. It's being used to work smarter, not harder. There is so much reporting that is done, but there are errors so you still need a human in there.

Talent through every stage of a career: How should learning and development evolve from apprentices through to experienced leaders?

CB: I thought the question should be phrased: ‘How should it evolve from leaders to apprentices?’ I think it should be a top down approach because learning should always be a constant development throughout. If you've got a leader who is constantly learning and has a desire to keep learning, that should filter through your mid levels down to your apprentices.

GA: We used to talk about the Peter Principle, so the fact you might be a good engineer or a good technician doesn't necessarily mean you're going to translate into a good manager. Because you're excellent in that field, you get promoted, so we have to be aware of that and make sure people get the training to fulfil that role.

JB: Sometimes people don't want to do it. We have had some amazing chefs in the past, some of them still work for us, and we have asked if they want to be a head chef, but they just want to stay at their level, doing what they do, because they love it. And we've got to respect that and work with them with the skills they have currently.

ED: It happens in teaching all the time. The best teachers in the classroom are taken out to become heads of year. You might take someone from teaching 25 hours a week to only two or three because they're doing head of year stuff.

SH: People need training in those early stages of being a manager. They have to learn how to have difficult conversations and manage conflict.

GA: Sometimes it's not a bad thing to take people out of their comfort zone and put them in a position they may not fully understand, but as long as you’re supporting them in that, you're not setting them up to fail.

PCS: We've not always gone for experience. We've given someone a chance, looked at the potential of where they can be, and we've gone, “You go and grab that and go with it.”

MR: We have younger people who understand some of the technologies that I have no idea about, and they are passing those skills up, as well as us passing skills down. We totally changed the way we operate in terms of our meetings. We now do an individual meeting every quarter and then every year we have a full team meeting. Individuals are now ambassadors for certain things and then they are sharing the knowledge to the different teams. We have people aged from 18 to 63, and the knowledge passing from an 18 year old to a 63 year old is really quite interesting. The experience being passed back is great too. I love that development.

ZW: It's got to come from the top down. It is something we embrace and you can't stop learning, especially in today's society and how technology is coming along. We learn from the people we bring in. We are constantly educating ourselves and trying to better ourselves for the business and individually.