The power of story telling is a theme that comes up a lot in engagement, marketing, knowledge management ... but I didn't expect it to emerge as a way of tackling skills shortages in the construction industry. My mistake.
The occasion was a roundtable discussion organised by the Edge Foundation before their annual awards ceremony. The foundation is dedicated to raising the status of vocational learning, which means helping young people develop practical skills through apprenticeships or other means. Government and the education industry is more inclined towards university degrees.
The roundtable I was facilitating was discussing how to deal with the predicted problem that 348,000 more employees will be needed in the construction industry by 2010. Will the 87,000 new recruits each year be home grown, or come from Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria for example?
Participants from the Foundation, and firms that had already won regional awards, could tell plenty of stories that brought reality to the figures. Young people didn't see engineering and construction as sexy, cool places to work and learn on the job. Graduates coming into the industries often lacked practical skills.
Any new mechanisms Government and colleges put in place to address this wouldn't work if young people and their parents weren't convinced. So who could solve that problem? At that stage I tried a little pro-active facilitation, and suggested that maybe those young people already in the industry might have something to contribute. They will be the experts on what appeals and what doesn't to other young people.
At this point Scott Sharkey really lit up. Scott had earlier explained that he had come up via "the gladiatorial route" from joiner to CEO of the Edinburgh-based firm bearing his name. When Margaret Thatcher urged everyone to go self-employed, and companies shed their apprenticeship schemes, Scott went the other way and set up the Sharkey Academy, where more than 40 young people learn the trade and gain qualifications.
As you can hear in the interview, Scott's plans for expansion have been cramped by recruitmernt problems - and he thinks the industry is facing a disaster unless something can be done. After our discussion he's going to ask his apprentices what they think.
Never mind us clever dicks trying to think of it - the reality is that the young guys and gals have got the soluition. I'm going to go back, get all the solutions from them and implement it. They can tell the stories to the wider audience, and young people, and tell them it is a sexy industry, a place to be ... and they can replicate what I have done from young apprentice joiner to company CEO.
At which point I could suggest workshops to think it through, blogs to tell the stories ... but somehow I think that Scott and his colleagues will work out some new directions pretty quickly. If they need a wider audience, the Edge is shortly launching a social networking site called The Horses Mouth. It will offer peer mentoring, features, articles, reports and reference materials. Good stories too, I hope.
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