Business goes back to school!

If you’re as long in the tooth as I am, you’ll probably remember the days when the only contact between industry and education was when an employer contacted the local school or college for ‘a couple of lads to start on Monday’.

It’s hard to appreciate how much that’s changed!  As you may yourself know, these days businesses regularly offer work placements to a wide range of students, take part in school workshops and offer mentoring support to teachers and learners.  Local business leaders are often asked to be school governors and to donate materials for use in lessons and fundraising activities.  What’s more the new qualifications like Diplomas, which started in 2008, include compulsory periods of work experience.

Outside schools, Job Centre Plus ask employers to offer work trials and to consider the long term unemployed in their recruitment, e2e providers need work placements and even Gordon Brown has recently suggested that businesses will be asked to offer ‘3 month internships’ to recent graduates and to train the unemployed.

So it seems that they key aspect of this is the Government, schools and other public bodies asking for business support. So I wonder what you think?  Perhaps you are already involved with local schools and offer work placements, do you think this benefits your business?  What incentives to you think the Government should offer to get more businesses involved with education? Do you think that business has an obligation to work with schools to ensure the future workforce is correctly skilled? Or have businesses got any time left to actually do business? Let us know what you think…

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