Emergence from the Covid 19 pandemic, combined with economic pressure and global uncertainty, created challenging circumstances for everyone.
We used this period of change as an opportunity to adapt and grow, finding innovative ways to share our insights from our global partnerships to help drive up training standards to world-class levels to help more young people get the best start in work and life.
Never has it been so important that young people have the right skills and mindset to succeed. And through the pandemic we saw young people from all backgrounds take part remotely in our national competitions programme, showing their skills, resilience and determination, despite the barriers to training. While our Spotlight Careers events, focusing on digital and green skills, continued to inspire young people to choose future success in a rapidly evolving labour market.
Working with educators too, we were pleased to be building on firm foundations to expand our work in continuing professional development programmes in our UK-wide network and the WorldSkills UK Centre of Excellence, supported by NCFE. We worked together to mainstream world-class training and assessment methods, benchmark performance data nationally and internationally and deliver online masterclasses, including our first major online conference.
We launched the Skills Taskforce for Global Britain, a group of business and skills leaders, commissioned to consider what we can learn from other major global economies about the importance of developing a world-class technical skills base. The key aim was to define how the nations and regions across the UK could develop a competitive edge to secure greater international investment to create high-quality jobs for the next generation in growth sectors such as digital, green tech and advancing manufacturing.
Over the next year, we will focus on growing our network of partners across the UK’s regions and nations to raise standards through international benchmarking, empowering more diverse young people to take advantage of the world-class training on offer, and championing future skills so more employers in key growth sectors of the economy get the high-quality talent they need.
Our thanks to all our partners in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for helping us deliver high-quality development opportunities for so many young women and men. Because we believe that when young people succeed, we all succeed.
I hope you will take the time to download the Annual Review for more details on our activities and quick reference informatics showing the scope and impact of our work.
Download the Annual Review
