Debate: Investing in skills for growth

Skills are key to any business’ growth. With Boost Business Lancashire; Lancashire’s Business Growth Hub, we brought our panel to Brockholes to look at skills, training and development and their impact on productivity.

PRESENT:

How do we persuade businesses to keep investing in skills?

Andrew Leeming:

It’s about how, as business owners, you try to enforce and reinforce the idea that you need your staff and your team to be the very best they can be.

Lisa Moizer:

Nigel Davies: You need to know your own business. One of the key things we have looked at and have a clear understanding of is demographics in relation to how we deliver skills and training.

We invested in our training centre because we wanted to look at how we innovate and inspire our existing workforce, but also the next generation.

Richard Harrison:

Skills provision has to be linked to benefit or impact. If we’re selling skills commercially the first thing we need to do is go to a business and talk about the impact and the return on investment.

Andrew Leeming: There’s a real stereotype out there about training being this really dull, uninteresting load of paperwork and we need to shift the conversation away from training that is passive into training that is dynamic, exciting and invigorating.

Susan Meadows:

It’s about developing a flexible training force and that’s not just about doing a course every now and then.

Chris Smith:

Louisa Scanlan: The people who are coming towards the end of their careers are the ones we need to be using as our mentors and our coaches to ensure their knowledge and experience is instilled in the younger generation and I think we miss that.