Our trip to Gateshead

We’re in a period of heavy travel around the country, interviewing companies large and small for our Best Practice Report. This work will examine the great ways that companies hire and train staff. A vital part of that, as we found when researching our last big report, Two Million Jobs, is the way in which colleges interact with local employers in the training and hiring of people.

To that end, we visited Gateshead College, speaking with Phil O’Neill, Head of Digital Technology and Games there. He told us about how the college is focused on “education with an employment edge”, meaning they try and tailor the curriculum to fit the needs of local employers. There is also a focus on “soft skills” – making sure the students have the skills and confidence to progress (how to navigate the interview process, for example) and more importantly, keep their positions through interpersonal prowess. 

We were lucky enough to get to see all this in action ourselves, as on this same trip we got to witness their Bridging the Gap event down the road, at their Academy for Sport. Here we saw a panel discussion and speed matching of students and employers – we even got to take part in a group activity, with Nick Tyrone, our Research Director, presenting the findings to the 100+ employers, students and educators in attendance!

Back at the college on the same day, we visited an event for girls in secondary school around getting them interested in tech careers. It was another great example of how key post-secondary institutions can be to both creating employment locally today, as well as in the future. 

While we were in the North East, we also spoke to David Dunn, CEO of Sunderland Software City. It’s a non-profit that is dedicated to helping grow the North East tech sector. It does this through many avenues, including events – but it also creates jobs in the tech sector directly, taking on a host of junior developers who tend to split their time between working on internal projects and and tech builds for other local employers in the region, including start-ups and scaling businesses. 

The visit was another testament to the importance of interconnectivity in economic growth, as well as the vital role post-secondary institutions play to local economic well-being and job creation. 

We are undertaking visits across the country on a weekly basis to inform our best practice report, with trips to Wales, Manchester, Yorkshire and Derbyshire coming in March too. If you want to find out more about our work or think there’s an organisation that could better inform our research, please get in touch at info@thejobsfoundation.com.