OVERALL business in Edinburgh and Scotland continues to benefit from a rich pool of talent.
It is no coincidence that Edinburgh is second to London in average gross earnings per resident. Edinburgh is a leading European city in terms of providing one of the most highly educated work forces. Working age residents educated to degree level or above in Edinburgh now stands at 42 per cent.
This growing pool of talent is a critical success factor in attracting and retaining leading global brands as well as a thriving business community for business start-ups. Scotland's international reach is growing as we continue to expand in new markets and business sectors.
Ensuring education providers understand the changing skills needs and strategic focus of the business community is key, particularly as competition in attracting and retaining talent continues to grow geographically.
At Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, our strategic partnerships within higher and further education establishments are helping bring business and education even more closely together. Our Economic Development Groups on Digital, Tourism and Infrastructure all have "talent" as a key enabler to deliver sustainable growth.
We must also ensure that businesses view training and development as an investment rather than a cost. Too often these budgets fall victim to savings targets in annual budget processes.
Scotland offers unique and special relationships between the public and private sectors regarding education and business support. Ensuring we continue to share best practice is essential to optimising value and effectiveness.
There is a plethora of short and long term training opportunities for employees at all levels and developments in technology are improving opportunities to access affordable and effective training.
It should not only be our top sports stars who are openly proud to explain how many coaches they have! We need to see more ongoing development initiatives as we strive to develop the best leaders in the future.
We must also challenge ourselves to ensure our talent is fit to compete in a global market. This includes learning new languages and building knowledge and expertise in doing business overseas. In Edinburgh and Scotland, we have every reason to be proud of our track record. As the business world becomes even more digitally connected, labour more mobile and our competitors grow in confidence; we must ensure we set even higher standards across all levels of business.
The quality of talent has been fundamental to our success in the past and will continue to be a key differentiator in the future.
David Birrell is chief executive at Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article