Future of Manufacturing

Wow, what a subject.

On one specific area - preparing people for the world of work (including the skills), my observations:-

1. Kids leaving school (at any age) are generally not prepared in any way for the real world, including turning up, basic workshop skills etc. so are useless for some months beyond menial tasks. I remember meeting university students on block release, they were 21, I was 17, they seemed like children to us, yet we were just the same a year before.

2. As pointed out by others, large employer training schemes in manufacturing are now few and far between, especially in the "craft" skills.

How do we fix this?

a. Colleges need to operate like employers not schools i.e. marks for attendance, involvement etc. as well as attainment. When I was an apprentice mumble mumble decades ago there were consequences if you didn't turn up, unlike most schools.

b. Colleges need to do the recruiting, then after some months find the employer not the other way round i.e. by that time they are more ready for work and can be useful much quicker. It removes most of the admin/risk for the small business and has an element of filtering i.e. the useless/disinterested ones have already been fired off the course. It's not always their fault, at 16/18/21 if you have never worked in a manufacturing environment for instance you don't know what it is like.

That is where the apprenticeship levy should be spent.

Just my 2p.

Roger Greenwood said:

Colleges need to do the recruiting, then after some months find the employer

Something we had long discussions about when I was on a local manufacturer's forum which included FE representatives...the problem with that is that if the college is taking the lead they are offering an apprenticeship including X months / years "industrial experience" - and if they can't find it then the college is at fault - for something they have no control over. So the colleges' views were simply "not touching that with a bargepole"!

What did start looking practical was similar, that it wasn't employer led but was "someone else led", which would mean that the work experience opportunities could be shared amongst a number of employers. But we could never work out who the "someone else" was. Which I guess is sort of where you are coming from, but as above the FE colleges were very clear it couldn't be them as they had no authority over employers or any other way of tempting them to assist.

I'm still convinced there is the germ of an idea in there though. We found that all our local companies who engaged (and it was a lot of them) wanted to support apprenticeships in principle, and were happy to provide a level of work experience, just not to the level of tying themselves to particular people.

You're correct Andy, I don't know how to do it, just that it has to be that way round. I suspect the colleges consider themselves purely academic (which of course they are) and what is needed is a training centre linked to a college, like this one https://wyms.co.uk/apprenticeships where employers can pick employees from. At the moment they don't operate like that, but they could.

Hello Roger:

Why do you call them "Colleges" when they are "Universities' which are "for profit" businesses that live on money collected from the students (as many as possible from overseas, who pay more money) and research funds for meaningless subjects.

The students end up with a lot of personal [debt and maybe a job delivering food to homes with their MBA or PHD's degrees.

Peter    

Hello Roger:

Lets ask a more basic question --- What do the parents want for their children?

That is, other them permanently out of their house, before they are 26 years old

Peter

Hello Roger:

Lets ask a more basic question --- What do the parents want for their children?

That is, other them permanently out of their house, before they are 26 years old

Peter