The landmark Wood Commission report this summer laid bare the challenges facing all those tackling Scotland's employability agenda.

As highlighted by The Herald's SME-SOS campaign, Sir Ian Wood warned that the education system had abandoned the 50 per cent of youngsters with no academic aspirations, and that "we are simply not preparing or equipping these young people for the world of work".

Although the education sector has the key, any response has to span public, private and voluntary sectors, and independent business-led charity Scottish Business in the Community now in its fourth decade is playing a unique role.

On the day of the independence referendum, SBC's chief executive Jane Wood issued a rallying-call focused on common rather than dividing issues. She reminded business that it "shares the nation's responsibility to tackle poverty, improve education and employability, and harness the potential of the workforce, by developing sustainable and responsible business models". There was, she said, "an increased role for business in addressing social, environmental and economic issues, and this is fundamental to Scotland's success".

SBC's traditional role as a facilitator of community involvement for its member companies lives on in its hubs, groupings of local businesses addressing local issues. It also tries to spread the message through the SME supply chains of member companies.

But these days SBC also works for Scottish Enterprise, Education Scotland, and the Scottish Government, delivering programmes on sustainable business models, healthy food choices for youngsters, and welfare reform issues for employers.

Its partnerships with its UK big brother Business in the Community reflect core values. One initiative enables people to overcome disadvantage and move into employment, another seconds talented managers into needy communities to help tackle local issues, while a third offers a framework for developing long-term partnerships with businesses and schools.

Karen Davidson, who heads up training and advisory services as well as development and communications at SBC, says: "For some reason, because we are a business-led not-for-profit whose mission is for everyone to prosper, we sit in this space and no one can disagree with what we are trying to do, which gives us a strength and we are listened to."

Given the First Minister's recent call for business to be more engaged in schools, the 20-strong SBC will be kept busy. "The challenge is to scale that up without scaling ourselves up," Ms Davidson says. "We can never be more than one step ahead of what business is doing, it is about keeping pace not only with business but with the expectations of society and what they think we should be doing."

Primary schools, which typically may have never had any links to business, are now a target area. "Rather than going into high schools we are now looking at going in younger. We have got Scottish Gas who have made a 12-year commitment to mentor a young person all the way through their education."

A key finding of the Wood report was the lack of mentors, while another was careers education. "It feels as though schools don't realise that 90per cent of kids in P1 are going to be doing jobs that haven't yet been invented," Ms Davidson says.

SBC helps employers such as Standard Life fulfil a social mobility pledge, "reaching out and driving harder to find potential talent rather than just going with graduate schemes", Ms Davidson says, while a Bank of Scotland executive team had spent a day engaging with a group of formerly homeless young men. It was all part of making businesses more sustainable. "What I really hate is when businesses say they want to give something back - it is an equal relationship." She adds: "A lot of people in other sectors don't think about who is creating the wealth and who is creating the tax.... Young people don't know where they fit into society, they have never had a conversation with an employer."

Maggie Robb, who runs PwC's community engagement programme in Scotland and its environmental volunteering UK-wide, says when she joined eight years ago graduates had to be encouraged to get involved. "Now they are hitting the ground running and helping lead this. It is a huge piece of our staff learning and development." PwC has mentors working in three Scottish high schools, including 35 in Glasgow. "We are not working with the hard to reach or really high fliers but the group in the middle who are often ignored," Ms Robb says. The firm also runs workshops around employability skills and staff coaching, working with heads and teachers as well as pupils.

PwC has also set up the Social Entrepreneurs Club, with 44 Scottish members. It runs workshops for early-growth start-ups in the sector, and is hoping to launch a mentoring scheme in Scotland for social entrepreneurs and roll it out across the UK.

Ms Davidson says business engagement has gone beyond CSR box-ticking. "People think it's greenwash or whitewash, I see it as a movement of employers. Rather than silos of public, private and NFP sectors, we are bringing them together for smarter working and more effective use of resources....failure to do that causes so much waste of young people in society, which we can't afford."