Scotland has great opportunities to seize in the next few years, arising from the improving economic performance, but only if we invest in skills, infrastructure and innovation.
The prize is worth working for - a significant improvement in our standard of living from improved productivity.
Focusing on investment in the skills component in particular, opportunities arise from the recent Wood Commission report for Developing Scotland's Young Workforce, and a deeper understanding of the issues and potential solutions.
Recent Chamber research identifies that businesses in the North East want to recruit people with the right skills.
These are communications (90 per cent), teamwork (88 per cent), customer service (72 per cent), problem solving (67 per cent), computer literacy (66 per cent), planning and organisation (65 per cent), literacy (62 per cent) and numeracy (60 per cent).
When it comes to recruiting from education, businesses clearly believe that employability improves with age and maturity, but is not yet where it really needs to be.
Research on business's assessment of the intake from education to the world of work gives us a useful and simple index of work readiness: for school-leavers an index of minus 70, for college-leavers an index of minus 49, and for graduates an index of zero.
The index indicates the balance of employers regarding the intake as either work-ready or unprepared.
This can act as a baseline for our commitment to improve the status quo.
For reference the index for the long-term unemployed is minus 51 and on a par with college-leavers.
Businesses identify lack of work experience (79 per cent), lack of soft skills (58 per cent), education's lack of focus on work preparedness (50 per cent), lack of technical skills and formal training (49 per cent) and lack of careers advice (44 per cent) as the main reasons why young people and the long-term unemployed are unprepared for work.
We need to work to improve all of these areas of weakness through education and employers working with common purpose.
This is where the Wood Commission for Developing Scotland's Young Workforce comes to the fore.
All of these issues and more are clearly identified, as well as some of the solutions to getting a more positive, productive and effective relationship between employers and education.
The Chamber network is well aware of the sort of workforce issues that businesses face on a day-to-day basis, related to recruitment, retention, skills and shortages, and these issues are common to all sectors in Scotland.
The formation of regional Invest in Youth groups is now the focus of improvement, and Glasgow and Aberdeen Chambers are leading the way. We need your support.
Robert Collier is chief executive of Aberdeen & Grampian 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