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Good morning everyone. I'm delighted to welcome you to the second of our series Skills in Focus seminars.
Skills in Focus is a series of seminars
that have been arranged by the joint skills committee between the Scottish
funding council and Skills Development Scotland designed to
help our understanding of the issues that are effecting Scotland's economy from a
skills perspective. We know a lot about unemployment,
levels of unemployment but we know less about less visible
forms of labour underutilisation. The series of seminars will help ensure that the work that we are
doing
is as evidence based as possible
and also we hope that the
presentations we hear at the Skills in Focus seminars
are useful to others, policy makers in government and elsewhere as
well as organisations with whom the funding council and SDS works
closely. There are a large number of
studies, a large number of programmes. How do we add it up and made sense of it all
and what does the evidence say? We are at a point where we are reviewing
and revising some of our employer offer within in Skills Development Scotland and I
already had a few ideas of different things that we need to be doing, listening to employers
but it was good to have that research. Now I'm supporting and underpinning what I'm
hearing anecdotally from employers so it gives me that robustness to actually take any ideas
forward. Now the structures of most industries just don't allow that not if you stay in that business.
I think Skills in Focus helps to
explore in a kind of collegiate way with partner organisations. some of the
issues that are most difficult to get get your head around, you know, solving
the problems around the economy and around skills issues is not easy
if it were easy
then we wouldn't need these events. So thank you very much.
It's really viable to have that sort of forum where you bring together different elements and policy makers, people from an academic background to discuss issues around labour market programmes
and the current issues facing the economy. It is an excellent event, it really got the
old brain cells working very hard in particularly with a mixture of both some new quantitative figures
that give you the broad picture but also the speakers have an exceptional knowledge on a
nitty gritty skills development, training
development, employment schemes etc. The feedback that we've had from participants has been incredibly positive
people have found the presentations from the academics
both thought provoking and useful
but just as important I think are the opportunities for networking and engaging
with other organisations with a similar interest area.
So put those two things into your decision making hat and I'm sure we'll see you
along at the next one.