Summit Skills - Train to Gain
I don’t seem to have mentioned Summit Skills before although it’s been on my radar for a few months.
Back in August Summit Skills were working on a sector skills agreement for building services. More details here. 5 stages have been identified for the project:
- What skills do we have now and need in the future?
- What training provision do we have?
- Where do we need to improve current workforce development?
- How can we work together to address these issues?
- The final agreement is produced
The final findings were due in the spring but the site seems to have gone very quiet. I hadn’t received any email updates at all on the project.
The sector skills agreement seems to have taken a back seat to some other initatives. The new ‘Train to Gain’ initiative is a scheme to help employers in England identify their skill gaps and raise their minimum skill levels to a Level 2 certificate. LSC have a press release about the scheme’s initial success here (pdf, 3 pages).
I’m confused as to how we’ve jumped from saying ‘we don’t know what the skills gap is as an industry’ to ‘bugger that, let’s just let individual companies get on and train people’. Whilst the second one seems ultimately more useful, the old adage ‘You can’t manage what you don’t measure‘ springs to mind. Perhaps all the research has been done and is winging it’s way to us in the next few months? Anyone know?
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