Do we have a skills gap, or an experience gap?

We talk a lot about skills gaps.

We talk about young people needing to be “work ready”, having the right “employability skills” and being able to communicate confidently with employers.

But a discussion hosted by the North East Chamber of Commerce around the latest Local Skills Improvement Plan (LSIP) raised a slightly different question: do we have a skills gap, or do we increasingly have an experience gap?

It’s easy to look at a 16-year-old who struggles to speak confidently to an employer and conclude that they need better communication skills.

But we also need to ask where they were supposed to learn them.

Where did the first jobs go?

For previous generations, the first experience of work often had very little to do with a future career.

It was washing dishes, delivering newspapers, working in a shop, collecting eggs or doing any number of small part-time jobs.

They weren’t necessarily the first rung on a carefully planned career ladder. But they taught things that are difficult to replicate in a classroom.

Turning up when somebody expects you. Speaking to adults you don’t know. Asking a question when you’re unsure. Getting something wrong. Taking instruction. Dealing with customers. Understanding how a workplace operates.

Perhaps most importantly, they gave young people the opportunity to become comfortable with being new.

Technology, automation and changes to the labour market mean many of those traditional entry-level opportunities have reduced or disappeared.

At the same time, employers are under pressure too. Smaller teams, tighter margins and busy workplaces mean the capacity to train someone from scratch, host meaningful work experience or give a young person time to find their feet can be limited.

We want young people to arrive with experience, while making it increasingly difficult for them to get that experience in the first place.

That is a problem we need to solve together.

There is no single definition of “work ready”

Another important theme from the LSIP discussion was the language we use.

Terms such as “employability skills” and “work ready” are used frequently, but they can mean very different things to different employers.

For one business, communication might mean being comfortable speaking to a customer. For another, it could be working safely and effectively as part of an operational team. Different roles, workplaces and young people need different things.

There isn’t a single intervention that will make every young person “work ready”.

There are, however, practical ways we can create more opportunities for them to build experience.

Shared apprenticeships are one example, potentially opening apprenticeships to employers who might struggle to provide a complete programme alone while allowing young people to gain experience across different businesses and disciplines.

Work experience matters too, but only if we make it realistic for employers to offer it.

If we want more businesses to participate, we need to understand the barriers stopping them and do more of the work required to remove those barriers.

And we can’t start at 16

By the time a young person is making decisions about college, apprenticeships or employment, much of their understanding of the world of work has already been shaped.

That is why role models, employer encounters and exposure to different industries need to start much earlier, including at primary school.

It doesn’t mean asking a ten-year-old to choose a career.

Quite the opposite.

It means showing them how many possibilities exist before we start asking them to make choices.

This is particularly important in maritime, where the sheer breadth of careers is often poorly understood. Ports and shipping are part of it, but so are engineering, manufacturing, logistics, construction, energy, technology, professional services and many more.

A young person cannot aspire to something they don’t know exists.

Making doing nothing socially unacceptable

Perhaps the strongest ambition discussed was getting to a point where doing nothing to support the next generation becomes socially unacceptable for businesses.

It’s an ambition Tees Maritime Cluster strongly supports.

But it has to come with a commitment from organisations working across skills, education and industry too.

Before we ask every employer to step up, we need to make stepping up easier.

That means removing unnecessary barriers, creating models that work for SMEs as well as large employers, helping businesses navigate education and skills systems and recognising that employers themselves need support to provide good experiences.

Then we can reasonably ask businesses to play their part.

Maritime recognised as a regional priority

It was also particularly encouraging to see maritime referenced throughout the latest LSIP and recognised as a clear priority for the region.

That matters.

Teesside’s maritime economy reaches far beyond the businesses operating directly on the River Tees. It enables activity across manufacturing, energy, logistics, engineering, construction and many of the sectors expected to drive the region’s future growth.

Ensuring that maritime’s workforce needs and opportunities are understood has been a consistent focus for Tees Maritime Cluster, working on behalf of our members and alongside education, industry and regional partners.

Because ultimately, skills policy only works if it connects with the real economy it is there to support.

And in Teesside, much of that economy is enabled by what was rather perfectly described during the discussion as our “blooming big river.”