Skills shortages in Gloucestershire are still an issue

Skills shortages right across Gloucestershire continue to affect companies desperate to recruit.

The latest quarterly recruitment outlook for Business West and the British Chambers of Commerce - in partnership with Totaljobs - makes difficult reading.

It reveals that almost three quarters - 73 per cent - of businesses who attempted to recruit faced real difficulties.

These shortages were predominantly felt across skilled manual roles and professional jobs with 80 per cent of construction firms and 71 per cent of transport and distribution businesses facing difficulties recruiting the right staff.

I am a great supporter of apprentices having been one myself from age 16 in journalism.

And editing newspapers for the last 20 years, I have  campaigned to encourage companies to take on more apprentices.

Our new government must do far more to make the Apprenticeship Levy less complicated for great apprenticeship providers like South Gloucestershire and Stroud College - one of the best sources of apprentices in the country.

However, a lot of our companies must realise that acquiring skills does not grow on trees.

It requires training and I find it amazing that in Gloucestershire something like 75 per cent of companies have a training budget of under £5,000 a year.

We have a falling number of young people in Gloucestershire available for work and unless more effort is put into training them and developing their skills many companies will be in real trouble.

Apprenticeships should, in my view, be at the heart of a company’s business model whether they are a large employer or an SME.

Renishaw, our county’s largest private company, is perhaps the best exponent of developing apprentices - girls and boys - into a world beating business.

In fact, Renishaw have something like 144 apprentices in training across their Gloucestershire and South Wales sites with the majority in this county.

This year, Renishaw are celebrating 40 years of apprenticeships having taken on their first apprentice in 1979.

And despite downturns in the business, they have stuck to their knitting on keeping the apprenticeship development going.

And this year, Renishaw recruited a record 68 apprentices into the business which now has over 5,000 employees in the 36 countries where it has wholly owned subsidiary operations.

Their apprenticeships example needs to be followed by our companies if Gloucestershire’s economy is to grow.