A chance to influence the skills pipeline

Every Shropshire business owner has an opinion about the skills gap. Far fewer are willing to trade that opinion for a seat in the room where it actually gets decided.

Ask any business owner in this county what is holding their growth back, and skills will come up before rent, before rates, before red tape. It's the one problem nobody seems short of an opinion on. What's rarer is finding people willing to sit in the room where those decisions get made.

For the past few years, I've sat as a governor at Telford College and served as an Enterprise Adviser with the Careers & Enterprise Company, alongside running Purple Frog.

I'd like to say I came to either role out of pure civic duty. Really, I came to them out of frustration, watching the same skills conversation happen at business breakfasts and industry panels, year after year, with nobody in that room having any actual say over what gets taught, how a curriculum gets built, or where employer input lands.

Governance isn't glamorous. It's the only seat at the table where a business voice gets to shape what the next generation of your employees actually learns, before they ever walk through your door.

It's budget scrutiny, safeguarding reports, and long meetings about capital projects that won't complete for three years. Nobody joins a board for the thrill of a curriculum review, but I've spent much of the last year in national conversations about AI skills policy, what employers need, what colleges can realistically teach, where the gap really sits – and I can tell you the theory only gets you so far. Sitting on a governing board is where you find out what's true on the ground.

Nowhere is that more urgent right now than AI. There's a real fear sitting in classrooms and staffrooms that AI will hollow out the jobs today's students are training for, and I don't think it's a fear worth waving away.

But the pattern I actually see in business isn't AI replacing people, it's people who've learned to use it well overtaking the people who haven't. That's true in accountancy, in marketing, in manufacturing, in sectors with no obvious ‘tech’ label on the door at all.

Essential digital skills – AI fluency included – now belong in every curriculum.

WHY THE BOARDROOM MATTERS HERE

Curriculum strategy doesn't get set in a vacuum; it has to answer to what local employers need and the direction the UK's industrial strategy is heading – and that strategy now has AI adoption written into it as a national priority.

A governor in the room can hold both of those in view at once, and push back when a curriculum review still treats AI literacy as optional rather than a baseline skill sitting alongside literacy and numeracy.

A full governor role isn't the only door in, either. Employer advisory boards, curriculum panels, and sector skills groups offer the same access at a lighter commitment.

Whichever route you take, the value runs both ways. The college gets a live, current read on what local employers actually need, and you get a say in whether the training on the table covers not just new entrants, but the upskilling your existing staff need to keep pace with how the work is changing.

That same partnership works just as well outside the boardroom. Offering to give a talk to students, or opening up a work experience placement, does more than tick a box; it gives a young person a genuine look at what a career in your industry actually involves, at exactly the age their aspirations are still forming.

It also happens to be one of the more practical ways a business can help a school or college meet Gatsby Benchmark 4 ‘meaningful encounters with employers’ without either side needing to reinvent the process to do it.

I won't pretend the commitment is small. A governor's role is a handful of meetings a year, plus the reading behind them – not something you can do half-heartedly between client calls. And the return isn't immediate. You don't walk away with a queue of ready-trained hires the following term.

What you get, over two or three years, is something more useful than that: real influence over whether your region's skills pipeline matches what your industry actually needs, and an early enough seat to do something about the gap such as an apprenticeship partnership, a guest talk, or simply making sure the careers advice a sixteen-year-old receives is grounded in today's job market rather than someone's assumption of it from a decade ago.

Shropshire has no shortage of capable business leaders with strong views on the skills gap. What it's short of is more of them willing to trade the opinion for the seat, or, at the very least, for an afternoon in front of a classroom.

·       Hollie Whittles MBE is co-founder and director of Purple Frog Data Analytics

Pictured: Annabel Hemingbrough and Hollie Whittles working with students from New Road and Telford Park schools at an employer-led digital skills workshop