Elmfield Training: Workplace Talent and Skills Award

 Recognising employers that are addressing the talent challenge by meeting the current and future skills needs of their business and their people.

Skills are at the heart of the UK’s ability to be competitive. 

• The UK is on course to have 1 in 5 adults below Level 2 (5 good GCSE’s) in 2010
• Over 40% of all jobs in 2020 will require a graduate level qualification
• With 75% of the 2020 workforce already out of education, employers must step up to the challenge of supporting their people to gain better skills
• 1.8m employed people in the UK considered not to have the skills needed to perform their job effectively

What we hope to hear about from the award entries: This award aims to recognise those companies who have understood the skills and talent challenge that their companies faces and more broadly their sector faces and have developed a programme of activities to address these challenges. We require all entrants to tell us about the programme of activities they have in place for their existing employees – which could include a general training programme as well as a talent identification programme. We want to understand how this is benefiting your existing workforce, but also how you are trying to find ways to enable this benefit to be gained more widely perhaps through your supply chain, clients, or employees family, or local community.

We also ask entrants to tell us about the work they are doing on routes into employment. Routes into employment could mean school leavers at 16 or 18, apprenticeships or graduate recruitment programmes.

Many organisations are benefiting from the positive impact of skills development in the workplace.  To read about inspiring examples, please visit www.bitc.org.uk/resources/case_studies and search under ‘Skills’.

Exceptions: If your ‘routes into employment’ work focuses on targeting the hardest to reach groups we suggest that you consider entering this set of activities into our Work Inclusion Award which recognises companies that are supporting people from excluded groups into employment and/or improved their employability skills. See case studies of Work Inclusion Award winners for more information.