By Katie Gallagher OBE
Our Mayor is now our Prime Minister, and the skills agenda he's brought to Downing Street is one we've lived and breathed for over a decade.
Andy Burnham has spent some of his first fortnight in office setting out plans to reshape technical education and get more young people into work, built on the MBacc model developed here in Greater Manchester. This is familiar ground for us. For over ten years Manchester Digital has worked to bring education and business closer together and made a difference where we can, because the gap between what young people learn and what the sector needs has never closed on its own.
That gap has become harder to bridge, economic uncertainty, higher costs and cautious hiring are playing their part as is AI, which is starting to strip out the routine tasks junior roles were built on. This has resulted in the entry-level jobs young people used to start in being harder to come by.
Alan Milburn's interim review, published in May, put a shortage of entry-level jobs at the centre of a "generational fault line", with one in eight young people now not in education, employment or training. His recommendations come in the autumn, but the direction is already clear and we didn't want to wait for them to get going.
We sit right in the middle of this, we represent the employers in this sector so we hear it from both sides, everyone knows that the talent pipeline is crucial to whether the sector thrives but it's harder to do in practice than it sounds. It's almost never a question of goodwill, firms want to help, however, they're short of bandwidth, the time and capacity to set something up and see it through. So we set out to remove that barrier, to make offering a placement of any kind simple, by taking on the matching, the interviewing, the safeguarding and everything else that usually makes it more effort than it's worth.
There's a commercial reason to act too, public sector procurement is almost certain to start weighting placements and apprenticeships as part of its social value requirements, which means companies bidding for public contracts will increasingly need to show what they already offer.
That's why we built Switchboard. You tell us what you can offer, from a week's work experience to a placement, an apprenticeship or some mentoring, and we sort the rest. We're not short of young people, it's employers we need.
