1 Changing priorities

As the way we work has changed, many organisations are redefining their culture and employee experience for a remote and hybrid-first world, and focusing on developing more inclusive workplaces and promoting social mobility. To understand what organisations are considering, and the skills they are focusing on, in the video below, Jessica Leigh Jones MBE, co-founder and Chief Executive of iungo Solutions, a company working at the intersection of business, education and government, discusses what employers can do to maximise diversity and enable social mobility, observing that ‘learning and development plays an important role in levelling the playing field for socially diverse talent’.

Recruiting and retaining that socially diverse talent benefits both employers and employees but, as Gemma Hallett, Head of Skills at Fintech Wales and founder of Mifuture, comments in the video, matching skills to roles, particularly in remote rural areas of Wales, has sometimes been an issue. However, remote and hybrid working is bringing new opportunities to these communities – though this is not without its challenges.

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JESSICA JONES:

My name is Jessica Leigh Jones. I'm the co-founder and chief executive of iungo Solutions, and I'm also the former chair of the Centre for Digital Public Services in Wales. My new white paper, written in collaboration with The Open University and TrainingZone, launched just recently. And we're looking at the role of L&D in enabling social mobility.

So the white paper is very practical. We do a deep dive into different socially diverse talent pools, the specific barriers that they face, and how we can help those individuals and those groups to contribute and add value to the organisation, whilst also then being able to progress and improve their social mobility. So it's a very, very practical paper. We're looking at providing hints and tips for employers to really maximise social diversity and maximise the talent in their organisations at a time where it's very, very difficult to recruit and retain new talent.

When we talk about social mobility from a workplace context, we're talking about how we can identify groups of individuals who may have specific barriers due to their socioeconomic background, and how we can help those individuals to overcome those barriers, so that they can achieve higher levels of success and progression within the organisation. Social mobility is important to organisations because, as we know, it is very, very difficult to recruit and retain talent. And so what recruiting from a socially diverse talent pool offers is the ability to recruit, grow, retain, and reward different types of talent that can offer different contributions, different perspectives, diversity of thought, that can help that organisation to go further.

There are many different types of social mobility. And there's guidance in the report on how, as an organisation, regardless of your size and your resources and your expertise in this area, there is guidance on how you can measure the social diversity of your workforce. There's also then guidance on how you can support specific individuals to really unlock the potential that they have and progress within your organisation.

Learning and development plays an important role in levelling the playing field for socially diverse talent, particularly for individuals who perhaps didn't connect particularly well with school, workplace L&D, and L&D in later life, offers that opportunity for individuals to access higher levels of education without being in what might seem an intimidating full-time education environment. And it's a little bit more practical for them to be able to engage with learning around their home, work, and life commitments as well.

GEMMA HALLETT:

You know a lot of people, young people in south Wales living in generational poverty, we’re in third generational poverty in some of the valleys. If we can break down those barriers using a very simple concept the young people helped design, to bring these opportunities into their communities. And with working as it is, hybrid models, we’ve got these companies in Cardiff that can employ people from the valleys, and without having to travel they can work.

There is an opportunity and equally a challenge for Welsh organisations. So if we just centralise around Cardiff right now. Cardiff companies are able to employ people in the valleys, people who may find traveling to Cardiff is more of an occasion than a commute.

So it opens up that talent pool. We can get into the communities because of remote working. We can offer Welsh people Welsh jobs. Conversely, because the skill set is maybe not there, those jobs are actually going remote elsewhere. So we're exporting skills. Sorry, we're importing skills, we're exporting jobs. And that's a real concern of mine because if we had the talent, if we've been on a journey and we'd upskilled that talent by now, we always knew it was coming, remote working, but the pandemic has just accelerated it. Welsh companies unfortunately don't have access to the talent they need, so they’re having to export jobs, import talent. But hopefully with the work that I'm doing and so many more, we can upskill a generation so those jobs stay in Wales.

JESSICA JONES:

There are lots of enablers available to employers to help them to work with these socially diverse groups. So longer-term interventions, maybe things like apprenticeships – higher apprenticeships, entry-level apprenticeships. There are various different pathways that exist to take people from all levels of the organisation up to filling those key skills gaps.

There are also much shorter-term interventions that are currently being developed. So, for example, the new skills bootcamps and the skills academies and related products that exist across the four nations can really help to plug those immediate short-term skills requirements.

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Clearly, the hybrid workplace is here to stay, meaning it is more important than ever to learn and develop the skills and behaviours required to succeed within this new environment.

If you are about to enter or return to the workplace, now is a good time to think about your expectations around hybrid working and to reflect on what your priorities are for personal and professional development in this next phase of your life. Activity 1 will help you to consider both of these things in relation to this course.