Future Careers Conference will bring businesses and careers advisors together

Warwickshire County Council's Skills Hub works constantly with businesses and education-providers to maintain a strong flow of skilled young people into the workplaces of Warwickshire. New initiatives are always coming down the track and here WCC Portfolio Holder for Economy & Place, Cllr Kam Kaur, reveals another – a Future Careers Conference to bring businesses and careers advisors together.

Skills is a subject which has always been very close to my heart. We owe it to our youngsters to give them all the career opportunities they need and deserve.

There is a lot of great stuff going on from ourselves and our partners. Warwickshire Skills Hub does fantastic work - Fay Winterburn and her team do so much and one of the great things about them is their creativity. There are always new ideas and projects on the way and one that really excites me at the moment is a Future Careers Conference due to launch in spring.

The Future Careers Conference is part of a series of activities planned this year around a theme of “educating our educators.” Warwickshire is home to such great innovation, from Esports and battery technology to the increasing demand for green skills.

Whilst we celebrate all these wonderful new jobs in our economy, we feel it is also important to recognise innovation and the changes to careers in other industries too such as Hospitality, Manufacturing and Healthcare. These industries too have integrated all different forms of technology and we should also play a part in telling the stories of progressive technology and the changes to the careers and employment opportunities which enable such progression.

The Warwickshire economy is fast evolving and that’s brilliant to see - now is absolutely the right time to ask businesses to come forward and share their vision of innovation and the skills they will need in the future.

We believe it is important to create the right opportunities to bring education colleagues and the world of business together to share such insightful visions and help shape Warwickshire’s careers provision and play a leading role in ensuring it reflects the future needs of the economy.

The Future Careers Conference will feature key speakers from industry and colleagues from Further Education settings. We really want this event to be interactive and meaningful with significant opportunities for education to also communicate what they need from industry to ensure their careers activity contains future skills needs.

A lot is happening around Skills from ourselves and our partners and other stakeholders in the region. I am delighted that we are organising the Future Careers Conference in conjunction with Coventry & Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership whose chairman Sarah Windrum feels as strongly about promoting Skills as we do. Sarah has amazing contacts and is keen to work with our Warwickshire Skills Hub team to call out to business leaders to ensure all industries have the opportunity to use this valuable platform to showcase their future careers vision. The collaboration of Sarah and the Warwickshire Skills Hub team, I’m sure, will be one with broad industry and education interaction. I for one am looking forward to seeing this work take shape.

The Future Careers Conference is the first in a series of activities and our aim is to then create a number of Future Career Leader tours days. These will see careers leaders participating in employer tours and activities - what better way to gain such first-hand experiences from industry and different working environments? We hope such visits will provide careers leaders with valuable content for their pupil sessions with takeaway resources such as careers films and information packs to support such delivery.

The Warwickshire Skills Hub hosts regular careers leader meetings and we know what a difficult time it has been for education-providers through Covid, with staff shortages and restrictions. We want to continue to give them all the support we can and we truly appreciate their engagement and commitment to future work such as this. We are also really pleased to confirm the return of our Autumn Skills Conference, which will be full of celebration and the launchpad for our careers activity for 2023.

I am very excited about the Future Careers Conference and, more broadly, very proud of the support that Warwickshire County Council is offering to businesses and the local economy post-Covid. No other county is offering support on the scale of our £140m Warwickshire Recovery Investment Fund - that is so exciting as our great county looks to move on from the pandemic.

If you are a business or education provider wanting to get involved with the Future Careers Conference then please visiti https://skillshub.warwickshire.gov.uk/ or contact the Warwickshire Skills Hub team at skillshub@warwickshire.gov.uk