28 July 2010
Semta establishes Regional Council for the South West to ensure
region has world class skills
- Rittall CSM Ltd Director to head up Semta’s Regional Council
for the South West -
Semta, the employer-led Sector Skills Council for Science,
Engineering and Manufacturing Technologies, has created a new
Regional Council for the South West to better support the skills
needs of employers in the region.
Alan Courts, Director of industrial and data communications
enclosures company, Rittal CSM Ltd, has been appointed as the Chair
of the Regional Council. Rittal CSM Ltd has a long association with
Semta and Alan brings a wealth of experience in the challenges and
opportunities associated with tackling skills and training.
The aim of the council is to better understand the specific
skills needs of employers in Semta’s sectors, helping ensure that
South West employers have the skills they need to succeed. The
Regional Council will also help employers to get their voice heard
at a local and national government level.
Semta represents 129,400 employees at 6470 sites in the South
West where 22 per cent engineering companies have reported skills
gaps within their organisation. So Semta has been working to
support them. Since the start of the Semta Compact funding in
September 2008 Semta has developed training plans with 105 South
West companies. This has resulted in some 2000 employees in the
region being signed up for national vocational qualifications and
secured almost £2.5 million in Train to Gain funding. The top four
qualifications are Business-Improvement Techniques, Performing
Manufacturing Operations, Health & Safety, Team Leader and
Supervisory Training and range from Level 1 to 5 including
Management & Leadership.
Lynn Tomkins, UK Operations Director of Semta, said: “Semta is
dedicated to simplifying the skills landscape and, to meet the
needs of employers, it is vital that they are able to communicate
their specific needs in each region. The newly established Regional
Councils will better enable us to ensure that Semta and our
National Skills Academy for Manufacturing are offering the right
sort of training and funding support, helping mitigate the current
mismatch between supply and demand.
“To support each Regional Council, Semta has introduced a new
Skills Connector service, which allows us to support employers,
either face to face or online, and assess their individual training
needs.”
Semta’s 2010 UK Skills Report identifies the need for almost
10,000 new highly-skilled scientists and engineers a year between
now and 2016. Businesses working with Semta’s National Skills
Academy for Manufacturing have seen, on average, a 6:1 ratio of
return on their skills investment, helping many of them survive the
downturn.
Lynn Tomkins adds: “By working in partnership with employers and
other skills agencies we intend to make the entire process of
accessing the right training and funding much more straightforward.
We want to ensure it is exactly the training the organisation needs
and that it will provide real benefits to the bottom-line.”