The UK government has been putting together a new initiative, Skills for Jobs, that will help the younger generation develop job-worthy skills. According to education secretary Gavin Williamson, the initiative, which targets those in further education, will see a shake-up of post-GCSE education to develop skills that employers want to see in new recruits. Instead of further education being mostly academic, a bigger part of it will be skills-based.
Further Details About the Initiative
The core aim of this initiative is to ensure that everyone has the skills they need to enter the world of work. While many leave post-16 education with workplace experience and key work-related skills already on their CVs, many don’t. The initiative is going to shake up A-Level/college education so that there’s more attention given to work skills. By doing this, more young people will be better prepared for getting on the career ladder when they finish their education.
What the Department for Education wants is for everyone to benefit from the initiative, no matter where they’re from and what their background is. It also wants people not to think that going to university is the only way to have a successful career; if young people only do two years of post-16 education, they’ll pick up enough essential skills that they’ll still have a good shot at gaining employment and having a successful career in the long term. In other words, those who don’t go to university should have just as good of a chance of having a worthwhile career as those who do go to university.
Help for Adults
The initiative includes the Lifetime Skills Guarantee, which gives adults without A-Level qualifications (or equivalent) the chance to earn them for free in a range of sectors. There’s also Skills Bootcamps, which are three/four-month-long fast-track courses that target specific sectors and help people get into certain industries faster. For those who want to study more flexibly, the Lifelong Loan Entitlement will be able to offer financial help.
Other Changes and Features
As part of the initiative, a nationwide recruitment campaign will be launched. The purpose of this will be to get more teachers involved not only in further education, but also professional development courses.
Higher Technical Qualifications will also be looked at. They’ll be redesigned so that they’re better than before and will introduce a raft of new qualifications that people can gain from September 2022. To improve the number of people doing Higher Technical Qualifications, more effort will be made to promote them and showcase their benefits.
From 2025, people will be able to access a more flexible student finance system to help them fund courses. Funding will help people of all ages and skill levels to go on relevant courses to help improve their employability.
By 2030, it’s expected that most, if not all, technical courses will be partly designed by employers themselves. The purpose of this is to ensure that the courses are more directly related to the jobs they lead to.
Why Is This Being Developed?
The main reason the initiative is going ahead is to give Britain’s jobs market a major boost. The different parts of the initiative collectively make it easier for people to gain the skills they need for the employment they want; they help bridge the gap between further education (or a lack of it) and getting on the career ladder.
There are two factors that have encouraged people to put the initiative together: Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. The government wants to reassure people that a post-Brexit Britain will be a place where getting jobs, and the required skills, will be much easier. Because far too many jobs have been lost because of the pandemic, the initiative is incredibly important as it will help people who have been made unemployed get back into work more easily. It should also reassure the younger generation, whose education has been disrupted, that their future prospects won’t be jeopardised.
The phrase ‘build back better’ has been bandied about. The country has suffered significantly thanks to the pandemic. What the government wants everyone to know is that, thanks to the initiative, Britain can and will make a full recovery and will come out of it stronger than it was before.
Find Out More
The government’s official press release goes into further detail about the initiative and includes quotes by some of the key figures behind its development. Be sure to have a read and find out more details about the plans that are going to be implemented this year and in the years to come.