Why now, more than ever, we need to invest in careers advice

By Peter Mayhew-Smith, Group Principal and Chief Executive at South Thames Colleges Group

Did your college bid to become a Technical Excellence College (TEC) for construction? We did, alongside many other London colleges. (We weren’t successful, but send big congratulations to the college that was afforded this status.)

We can safely take this as proof that, regardless of the flaws in the model and the process, that there is strong support for the concept and an appetite among the sector not just for the additional funding, but for the status and the opportunity to create something new, something genuinely valuable. It is a fascinating opportunity and one that articulates a clear message about skills policy and its relationship with the labour market.

It draws heavily on the assumption that construction sector training places translate directly into construction sector jobs. There is varying evidence to support this, but also a host of good practice that increases the likelihood of this being true. We’re seeing significant investment in this belief and have been awarded extra funding by the Greater London Authority to provide more construction places from this September.

This new funding as well as the specification for these new Technical Excellence Colleges embed much of the approach that should yield the sought-after increase in people working in their target industries.

Close links with employers, opportunities to experience life in the construction sector, specialist training and great resources all help to capture students’ imaginations successfully and give them confidence in the industry they’re training for. But there’s more to do beyond the roll-out of a real-world, high-quality pedagogy. We also need to find ways to influence more people to consider jobs in the sectors hungry for talent.

We don’t have a system that selects children for the jobs they will do in the future.

No-one goes into a school and chooses the next generation of train drivers, nurses and farm-workers. Rather, we operate through informed choice with a host of influences playing across the minds of people making decisions about their futures. These choices are often not perfect; many careers start, stop and divert from their original roadmap. Occasionally they crash.

The point here is that many of the sectors identified by our Industrial Strategy and in all of our Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs) struggle to fire up the enthusiasm of the young new recruits needed to transform the numbers of people working in them. The problem of progression from course to job is addressed in the design of the TECs, but not the problem of the original choice of course.

In our work here in South London to deliver the outcomes prioritised in our LSIP, we’ve learnt that there is a lot of value in promoting these vulnerable, less popular sectors. Again, partnership with employers to help show off the potential quality of employment in those sectors, to create personal trust, is important. Job fairs and brokerage events have become a much more prominent part of our information, advice and guidance (IAG) strategy, allowing students and their families to gain understanding and build confidence in the likely outcomes of the career choices before them.

The case here is for ongoing investment in the IAG system, along with new approaches to it to help generate more interest in the sectors struggling to recruit. An information strategy based around those target sectors will be key to filling all of the TECs we’re set to create, and ways of making these critical jobs attractive and accessible need to be part of the plan. Part of this must be ever-better promotion of vocational pathways to young people in the school years to help make sure that the spectrum of choices before them is as complete as possible.

Similarly, we’re also getting to grips with the new Youth Guarantee programme and this work also seems to be pointing towards the development of new roles within the sector, with an apparent need for a data-driven, person-centred approach to the people most distant or most confused by the opportunities around them. Again, supportive brokerage strategies based on motivational but honest information about those opportunities alongside good quality advice are emerging as obvious ways to help more people engage successfully with the jobs market.

And then again, the national effort underway to help more people move confidently from welfare into work looks increasingly likely to benefit from effective engagement with those people, much more so than sanctions and speeches.

Autumn is always the perfect moment to provoke new thinking as encourage daring career choices where they make sense and again the crowds of applicants arriving at our doors present the potential for new ideas.

It seems very much that a lot of the ambition and detailed planning for growth in these critical sectors is well-founded on a set of very good bases, especially a great college sector, finding its feet again after years of neglect, but also many engaged employers and agencies at work in this context. Yet we also need the stimulus to people’s thinking, a change of mindset even, inspiration no less, to help improve the appetite for careers in some of these sectors. Capital investment in physical resources will help, but it will be essential to the whole mission that a new careers strategy and the professionals to deliver it in new ways of working between people, employers and organisations is in place.