Why Durable skills are essential

How can we better equip young people with essential, future-ready skills?

Why are nearly a million young people in the UK not in employment, education, or training, and what role do "durable skills" play in this persistent problem?

Join us as we welcome expert guests Andrea Barry from Youth Futures Foundation and Ema Marinho, Early Careers Lead at William Hare, for a candid discussion. Discover:

• Why there's a perceived "disconnect" between education and employers, even when young people have good grades.
• The critical role of mentorship and post-recruitment support in enabling young people to thrive in the workplace.
• How systemic issues, including financial barriers and varied awareness, particularly impact young people from ethnic minority backgrounds seeking apprenticeships.
• Bold ideas for encouraging more employers, especially SMEs, to engage with and support young apprentices.

This mini-series finale, hosted by co-hosts Bryony Kingsland, (City & Guilds), and Gavin O'Meara (FE News), dives into a challenge affecting every sector and every age group in the workforce: Durable Skills.

This episode offers vital insights for anyone involved in skills development, education, or employment. Tune in to explore the systemic challenges — and discover actionable solutions for building a future-ready workforce where no one falls through the gaps.

Listen now and gain a deeper understanding of how we can collectively empower the next generation! 

For further information about the material quoted in this episode visit:

Making Skills Work: The Path to Solving the Productivity Crisis - report

📢 Listen now and be part of the conversation shaping the future of skills.

Listen today, or watch on YouTube

Transcript

Andrea Barry (00:00.046)
And we recognize again that this is a system. Employers are part of the system. Young people are part of the system and schools are part of the system. And if the system doesn't talk to each other, that's when people fall through the gaps.

Gavin O'Meara (00:21.902)
Hey, welcome. Thanks so much for joining us for this is Future Skills, a joint collaboration between City & Guilds and FE News. And my name is Gavin O'Meara and I'm joined by the host with the most, Bryony, how are you?

Bryony Kingsland
Thanks for that intro, Gavin. Thank you for joining us, everybody, and welcome. This is the final episode of our Future Skills series in collaboration with FE News. I cannot believe I won't get to hear where Gavin is streaming from each time we do a session, whether it's Singapore, Berlin, Madrid, or the world's Borneo. I think you're in Madrid today, Gavin, aren't you? Yeah. Meanwhile, I'm here in Oxfordshire where it's raining, but the coffee is good. So this series was generated by the findings of the City & Guilds research 'Making skills work.

(01:02.86)
the path to solving the productivity crisis, which you can find on the City & Guilds website. That report highlighted an urgent need to rethink how we upskill and re-skill the UK workforce to meet the fast evolving landscape of workforce skills needs. this episode is one that I am hugely invested in and interested in because durable skills, the need for durable skills affects every single sector and all ages of worker. And by durable skills, we mean those skills that...

individuals need in every single job they do. That's the behaviourable skills, the cognitive skills, the employability skills. And there are particular challenges there for young people and employers recruiting young people. And we've got guests today who will understand that. And I know they're going to have some fascinating insights for us. So we have with us today Andrea Barry from the Youth Futures Foundation and Ema Mourinho, the Early Careers Lead from William Hare.

So without further ado, I'm going to ask the first question. Realistically, durable skills, everyone sort of knows what they are, but what in your view are the durable employability skills that are needed today? And why have durable skills become or employability skills become such an issue nationwide?

It's a really interesting question about this idea of employability skills, transferable skills, durable skills. I think when you do have almost a million needs, you do start to ask the question of whether or not sometimes young people are just struggling to get into employment because maybe they don't have these skills. But I would kind of turn that on its head and say, currently as a country, we have a lot of young people who are out of work, out of education due to other things that are not necessarily always related to what skills they have.

And I think if we recognise that this problem of needs, because it is a problem for the country, have this people out of employment or education, it's more than just the fact that they may lack certain skills as well. So again, this is also related to the poor mental health for a lot of young people that they struggle with. And they might have struggled with this during an education, they might have struggled with it during employment, but that is a huge issue we should be overcoming. And then of course, once these young people are ready to go back into work or ready to go into education.

Andrea Barry (03:08.108)
I think it is an important issue for them to understand what young people, when we talk to them, they don't always know what they need to get into work. They don't know what they need when talking to employers. We have our Connected Futures Partnership, which works with a lot of partnerships across the country. And this is working directly with young people to solve the systemic issue of youth employment in their area. And you hear this a lot from young people is that they don't always know how to talk to employers. They don't know how to show employers that they actually

They may not have the skills that these employers are looking for, but they're ready to learn. They're happy to learn and they can make it work if employers would take a bet on them. We hear that a lot in an area of Brent, actually, where they say that they don't always get to talk directly with employers to show that they are better or more than what they might look like because they're a young person with a really poor CV. So I think this idea of employability skills will be different for each young person and each employer because

Young people don't always recognise that they actually have skills. When they're able to send an email, that's a skill. When they're able to put together a CV, that's a skill. Going up and talking to an employer and selling yourself in that way to an employer is a skill. And I think it's recognising that young people, maybe at schools, maybe working directly with employers in schools, that would be a good opportunity for employers to understand what is a skill that them on the right track for sustained good employment.

And that sets us up brilliantly to move over to Ema because Ema, you are the early careers lead at William Hare. So what's your view as a recruiter inside and employer of all of this and also what Andrea's just said?

I so agree with what Andrea's just said from an employer's perspective and someone that brings a lot of young people into the construction industry, more specifically, we are structural still. What we do find is there seems to be a disconnect between colleges and schools and employers. We often find the young people meet the entry requirements. They do have good CVs, but they don't understand what careers are available. They don't understand.

Ema Marinho (05:10.552)
How to approach employers and businesses, they don't understand what extra skills they need apart from their GCSEs or their A levels. And there seems to be a very big disconnect in terms of having good grades. I think that's very stressed. It's very important that schools are stressing the importance of that, but it seems like there is a gap there career-wise. Essentially what we are finding is that a lot of young people find themselves with good grades, but not knowing how to progress or just having the traditional views that...

You finish your GCSEs, you get your A levels and you go to university. I can't tell you how many times myself and my colleagues go to colleges and schools and we find that young people are not even aware that they can do a degree apprenticeship. They don't even know what a degree apprenticeship is. They don't even know what find an apprenticeship domain is and how to find a good employer. They don't know how to dress for an interview. They come to career fairs and they're not really aware that they are able to bring their CV in and like Andrea said, just sell themselves.

I think there's a very big disconnect there. Schools are doing a great job in stressing the importance of education, but in this day and age, they do need to be discussing things such as how do you sit when you go to an interview? How do you approach employers? I mean, I'll give you a perfect example. We have a lot of relationships with our partner schools in the areas where we work, such as Scarborough, Berrien, et cetera. A quarter, if not a third of all of our apprentices will recruit on a...

yearly basis are people that we meet doing these events. They're young people that stand out. They're young people that chase me down to the car park after presentations and tell me that they're really interested in the roles that I discussed. They're young people that have asked for work experience opportunities. So what we are finding is that they can develop those skills, but it's very important for businesses and education institutions to work closely so that they are getting all the skills from a young age.

and they understand what is out there available for them and how they contain that because it seems like there is a very big need for that information.

Andrea Barry (07:11.308)
I was just going to add, think it's recognising that this is a systemic issue. This is not just a young person issue. And I also, think I would want to be kind to young people and remember what you were like at 16, 17, 18. I had no idea how to talk to adults properly. I had no idea how to do these things. It was my parents helping me. from the US. It was my high school careers advice helping me, you know, understand how to approach universities and approach employers. If I wanted a job while at school.

And I think it's just that all around support for our young person so they can understand what a trusted individual, someone to help them understand and connect really well with the system so they don't have a poor transition into employment, education or training.

I agree, Andrea, and I was going to say that's why I feel like it's so important for businesses. Even in construction, we often sit down and we speak and we say, there is a massive skill gap and we're struggling to recruit, but the reality is what are we doing to combat that? Are we going to our local schools and colleges and offering that advice to young people? Are we doing CV workshops? Are we doing mock interviews? So those are all of the things that are helping our local young people prepare themselves for future opportunities.

so they can actually bridge that gap that we are constantly complaining about.

I I'll drop in something as well. OECD have just released a report this week, so OECD are also agreeing with you both.

Bryony Kingsland (08:33.973)
I've seen examples of this. I've got friends and I've spoken to them about what their young children are going to do and their young people are going to do. And a lot of parents have a very traditional view of the roles that are available. So they do talk about accountancy, they talk about nursing, they talk about doctors. They don't talk about them amazing breadth of roles, which are expanding every day now because of what's happening in the world with automation means there are opportunities out there are so broad, both in green skills, in construction and infrastructure, in so many different industries.

But I think because parents are relied on so much and parents quite often have a very traditional view, they will push their children down a certain route and they probably themselves don't get the opportunity to really see what's out there. So what can employers do about this? Because I know it's all about the young people, but I've always said that I think our careers offer in the UK does need to be expanded out, but it also needs to maybe expand out to parents. don't know. So that parents understand the opportunities and they can also support their children better.

What do you think employees can do about that?

So I couldn't agree more with what you said. I think we do need to expand career advice to parents because especially at a young age, young people are really relying on their parents' influence and advice. One thing that we do do is we actually attend parents' evenings sometimes and we're just there to provide information. Great. We run workshops with parents so that they actually understand what apprenticeships are. What I have found is at times when young people go home and they tell their parents, I want to do an apprenticeship, parents get a little bit concerned because

there is this traditional view that, okay, you go and do an apprenticeship if you're not that good academically. And I've sat down with many parents at career fairs and schools and parent evenings that I've explained that no, like you can literally become anything via an apprenticeship. Like apprenticeships are actually great opportunities for you to learn academic and practical skills and develop a great career in the future. So I think, again, as businesses, it is our responsibility to not only educate young people, but also their parents because

Ema Marinho (10:34.382)
their progression is interlinked. So I definitely do think that there's a lot more space for us to do workshops and events.

a relatively recent report about why young people from an ethnic minority background are less likely to go into apprenticeships and as well finish an apprenticeship or go into them when they're older so that they might go to uni and then decide to go back for an apprenticeship. we found that when we did some qualitative work, because the data on apprenticeships and ethnic groups is so poor that when we went and did some qualitative work and actually spoke to young people, as well as anyone around that young person, we found that it's just the awareness and perception.

of an apprenticeship, know, parents and family networks play a crucial role in steering young people towards academic pathways because again, this is what they know, especially if you think of an ethnic minority group, they might've just arrived in the country, they might've been here for a while, but the perception of our aspiration is to always complete full-time education, is to always get a degree, you become something stable, and that's what you need to progress further in the future. And again, also just a financial barrier.

of doing an apprenticeship when your parents might not have a lot of money to support you during that apprenticeship. That is a keen problem for some of these young people, as well as just the experiences possibly of racism and the regional variation in the offers of apprenticeship. If you are a young person in some areas of London, you may not know that there are some types of apprenticeships available for you in London when the perception is that the apprenticeships are for the Northeast and you don't live there. And you can't move there if you want an apprenticeship in the first place. And I think that's just something really

Important to understand is just the awareness of what's available. It's the awareness of employers who offer these apprenticeships. It's the awareness of how to even do an apprenticeship, how to apply and what this means for you long-term. think for employers though, just overall, think if we recognise again that this is a system, employers are part of the system, young people are part of the system and schools are part of the system. And if the system doesn't talk to each other, that's when people fall through the gaps. And that's when you have these young people do a transition. Employers have to have a stake in the system.

Andrea Barry (12:38.902)
So they have to feel like this part of this is their responsibility to also have young people as part of their workforce and how to work with young people in helping with their skills. But again, education only does so much. The government can only do so much. And so the employers also have to recognise that they are part of the system to do more.

Bryony Kingsland (13:00.216)
Do you think there's an expectation out there? We talked about this before in previous podcasts and also just in the business I work in. So obviously the business I work in is a skilled business. So this is a big thing for us, but there seems to be an expectation out there with some employers that young people are going to walk into their business sort of oven ready. But actually there's definitely a need for like mentorship and strong support for the first six months for any young person entering that business to get them.

to the stage where they understand how the business works, how their job works, what their role is within that business. so actually induction and mentorship post the initial recruitment is also a really important part of any young person's, I suppose, journey in the business. What are your views of that?

100 % at William Hare, all of our apprentices are paired with a mentor for the first minimum two years. We don't believe in just bringing people in and expecting them to know what to do, but we, for example, recruit around 25 apprentices every year on average. It is hard to find skilled staff who's willing to spend the time. And just because you have skills and knowledge doesn't mean that you're good to pass them in for a young person. What we do find, for example, in our industry, it's an aging workforce.

Sometimes pairing someone that's 16 with someone that's in their 50s can be quite challenging. And how do we kind of merge that? How do we make sure the young people are actually getting the level of support that they need and they are paired with a mentor that can actually meet their needs. But yes, a hundred percent, think mentorship is an essential part of training and development of young people. But oftentimes we do find that there's the expectation of them kind of coming already with that work ethic or why don't you know that you need to get here on time?

Why don't you know that you need to dress up in this way? Why don't you ask questions? I think there's definitely, especially in our industry, there is that gap where all the people sometimes might actually struggle to understand someone that has just entered the industry. And it's really important for us as members of the HR team, for example, the learning and development team to explain that they are green, they are coming in. It is our responsibility to support them up until they're able to work independently. But equally.

Ema Marinho (15:11.49)
The people that what we find is these apprentices that we train and become qualified, they're the best mentors in the future. So we've got people that are mentoring people that we're recruiting, that they're literally been through the process. They've been the first person into a certain facility. They've gone to STEM events. They've had to sit these exams. So they're the people that really should be supporting the next generation. And it's just making that a normalised practice.

It's that generational cultural differences between what we would call sort boomers and Gen X and Gen Z and Gen A is quite broad sometimes, isn't it? There are quite a few cultural differences between those generations. Interestingly, what you were saying there, I think is really key. Many, many years ago, I worked at DfE and I worked on the apprenticeship reforms. And we went to another country in Europe and part of their apprenticeship system was that any employer that was going to recruit apprentices...

We're completely out of time. I'm sorry for the Bryony

had to train a certain number of their staff to be apprentice mentors and they actually had to go through a week's training and pass the qualification to become a mentor. I'm wondering if we need something like that in our apprenticeship system in the UK. Yeah, Gavin is holding up a thumb.

Gavin O'Meara (16:24.354)
DWP. Everyone really, really, really cool show. Thank you.

Andrea Barry  (16:33.902)
would say that Youth Futures are very interested, excited about a youth guarantee. We think this is a really good thing. This is a really good start. But when we recognise some of this is through DWP, there are a lot of young people who do not claim benefits, a lot of young people that they're missing that could be really well supported. They don't claim benefits maybe because they live at home or because they're just not known to the system. And we need to find a way to make sure we can keep getting these young people that are known to the system. And this is related to like leveraging a national

youth strategy, you know, over 400,000 young people are not on benefits, not accessing help, hard to reach, and we need to engage with them into employment or education as well. think improving this idea of a transition, know, young people say all the time that it's like managing a cliff edge where when they fail to transition, how can we give them this extra support to those who are most at risk of being need? This is where schools and colleges might also be able to help. This is really to data.

to better brokerage between career hubs and employer engagement and personal guidance premiums. And, you know, there's just so much that you can do around this. And again, I'm going to mention apprenticeships and rebalancing the apprenticeship scheme so that, you know, the best international evidence, we have our youth employment toolkit, this takes the best evidence internationally about what works to get young people into good, sustainable employment. And time and time and again, it is an apprenticeship.

the high level of an high impact of an apprenticeship on a young person trying to enter and stay in employment. Because if they're working with an organisation like William Hare, it sounds like they get paired with someone that helps to make sure they stay. They don't leave, they stay, they gain skills, they gain experience, and they gain confidence and they gain trust in the system of work as well. I think all of it can be done collectively. It's a really good first step. It's a really good first step when working as well with local.

hubs and local trailblazers as well, ensuring that everything a young person is facing works well for them locally as well. But there's so much more we could do. Some of them are fiscally neutral, so this is not going to cost a significant amount of money for a government that might be a bit worried about that. But there's also this idea, if we don't spend the money, we will still have the problem in the future. So the cost might seem a lot, but the cost of doing nothing is even higher. 69 billion pounds.

Andrea Barry (18:56.13)
back into our economy if we could solve the needs crisis, even getting us towards the levels of the Netherlands. So, and it's not zero needs, it's recognising that there's some young people who will be between jobs and education for a short time, a frictional side of needs, but the structural needs, and I say it's a bigger chunk, which it is, that could really plug an economy that's looking well for growth.

we have, there's massive, massive skills gaps that employers are speaking about on a continual basis. But there does seem to be a bit of a challenge for some employers with recruiting young people. A lot of the apprenticeships in the past we know have been spent on staff which are already an employer and who already ingrained in their job and embedded in their job. How do you think we can actually encourage employers to take on more young people in the apprenticeship system?

more support from education institutions. I've spoken, for example, of the levy. So that's one thing that's pretty controversial for larger organisations, even smaller organisations. We, as I said, we recruit around 25 apprentices every year as a business that wants to continually invest in the development of young people and bring young people into the industry so we can see them skilled. What we have encountered is the inability to have enough levy.

to fund these apprenticeship opportunities. So even in terms of levy sharing, okay, so there's a lot of other businesses in that industry that are unable to spend their whole levy because they just don't have the ability to recruit that many apprentices on a yearly basis. So that is just from a financial perspective, that has been one of our biggest challenges. We have been pretty, you know, pretty lucky to find really good businesses that have gifted us a lot of their levy, which has enabled us to continually.

recruit apprentices and create a quite steady pipeline of young people coming in, which we're able to train and develop and retain. However, I know that many other businesses in the industry do struggle with this. They do want to continue bringing young people in to the industry, but they just don't have enough funds. They don't have enough time to dedicate to training mentors, to making sure that young people are developing well, that we are retaining them once they're fully trained as well, which is a very big thing. What we are finding as well in the industry, it's a lot of young people.

Ema Marinho (21:08.044)
are completing their apprenticeships and not being retained. So then what are they doing afterwards? So all of this takes a lot of time and it does take money. And I think that the government can do a better job to continue to support businesses really to recruit and retain these young people.

What's your thoughts on that, Andrea, in terms of trying to encourage more employers to take on young people? Because we know that many, many just try not to for various reasons.

Yeah, I think just around the levy, I think that is a big underpinning lever. That's a really good opportunity for the government to reimagine and rebalance the apprenticeship system by even maybe even just ring-fencing 50 % of the levy for young people. And just for employers to have that understanding of what is available for them to spend on young people would be really important for them, especially if they're really worried about funding, I think.

I'm not an employer. I have never been an employer. I cannot imagine how difficult it might be for employers in this moment when you are maybe struggling with a drop in demand, know, vacancies are down, et cetera. There's been other policy changes that might have impacted them more. But I think, again, I would go back to this idea of we recognise that there are a lot of SMEs. 90 % of people work for SMEs. The government could look at helping and partnering more with SMEs.

we are partnering ourselves with WorkWild to really understand what the wraparound support would be needed for employers. I think once we can have a bit more evidence and more understanding and more information, it would be really, really useful to understand more about why employers still are, I wouldn't say reluctant, but maybe still a bit uneasy about taking on young people through apprenticeships if they had more information about what that meant. Even just again, the...

Andrea Barry (22:50.154)
engagement with good employers, with employers that do this work already, employers that already have a background in doing it, and understanding what that means to take on an apprenticeship would be extremely helpful for those employers as well. But I think, again, working with the government, working with other employers to really understand how they could shape this in a way that works well for them.

I think that levy sharing point that Ema made was really key. We know that some Mayoral Combined Authorities have really good levy sharing protocols in place and they actually gather levy and share it out across their employers, but that's not in place right across the country. maybe something the government could look to sort of encourage more levy sharing pots across regions to enable more employers to access increased levy where Ema says obviously there's not enough. But also, yeah, I completely agree, Andrea. I think the SME issue is...

is a real challenge for SMEs. They quite often don't have the resources or the bandwidth to be able to pump into actually setting up an apprenticeship. There must be some way that the government can work together with, as you've said, employers who are already engaged or just some other support functional mechanism which encourages more SMEs to take on more apprentices because we do know that that's an area of challenge.

Bryony Kingsland (24:01.39)
I'm really sad that we're not going to do any more for the moment, but hopefully maybe one day in the future. And Ema, Andrea, yes, thank you both so much. You've been great guests and you've given really good insights into how an employer, also how a youth orientated organisation can see improvements being made. Let's hope that there's someone from DFE policy that's listening to this and picks up what you've said and takes it away and starts doing something with it.

It's too great we don't have

Bryony Kingsland (24:27.555)
Bye everyone,