New year, new skills as South Devon College looks to business solutions

Emily Pearson, head of business solutions at South Devon College, reflects on a busy term collaborating with the local business community and looks forward to more opportunities to support growth over the coming year:

The autumn term was an incredibly busy one for the college, supporting our biggest ever cohort of 16-18 learners and continuing to develop our adult learning, higher education and apprenticeship offer.

Among this activity, South Devon College’s business solutions offer was created and launched in October, in recognition of the need to focus on collaborative working with local, regional and national employers to develop the skills needed for economic growth.

This service was marked by the relaunch of an annual Skills Summit hosted by the college. The aim was to engage with local and regional employers in a collaborative approach to develop the skills they need to drive growth, now and in the future.

Around 50 delegates attended from organisations including Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust, Willmott Dixon, Cosmic and Wollens. They were joined by guest speakers from the South West Business Council, Heart of the South West LEP, Devon and Plymouth Chamber of Commerce, TDA, Tech South West, Torbay Business Forum and the South West Apprenticeship Ambassador Network.

This important event provided a forum for the generation of ideas and to gain a real understanding of the challenges and opportunities on the horizon, that need to be supported with the right skills. This agenda is aligned with the Government’s Local Skills Improvement Plans, which places employers at the heart of local skills systems.

Over the course of the term the business solutions team hosted eight sector specific employer liaison events including engineering, business and professional, photonics - in partnership with the EPIC centre - hospitality and management and digital and computing.

These events welcomed a total of over 120 stakeholders from local businesses into the college for meaningful discussions around their skills needs for now and looking to the future.

It is absolutely vital that these conversations lead to action and we are committed to measuring and reporting on the output of each event.

During the business and professional event, employers asked us to design a programme of short courses in popular leadership and management subjects that employees could complete remotely to fit alongside the bus schedules of management teams.

Delivery time needed to be short and the courses had to be fully funded - free to the employer. The curriculum team responded within a month, with a seven-part programme delivered in bite-size chunks in two-week intervals, with nothing for the business to pay.

We are now looking forward to a busy 2023, with more industry liaison events in the pipeline, beginning in February with a Green Skills event for the construction industry and closely followed by a Green and Blue Skills forum for automotive and marine.

We’re incredibly excited to be working with local businesses in the early stages of developing the skilled workforce of the future in this hugely important agenda, and look forward to sharing developments with you.

Want to find out more or get involved? We’d love to hear from you. Email employers@southdevon.ac.uk