News: Performance Management
Gordon Brown outlines skills gap needs
03 December 2007
Prime minister Gordon Brown last week gave a speech to business leaders about addressing the skills gap in the UK.
Firms can do this by using in-house training, and the prime minister indicated his passion for the subject because he overshot the amount of time that had been allotted for his speech, Personnel Today reports.
He spoke about how people need to get better qualifications both when they are out of work, and when they are employed.
He said: "Up against the competition of more than two billion people in China and India - which have five million graduates a year - Britain, a small country, cannot compete on low skills, but only on high skills.
"Our imperative - and our opportunity - is to compete in high-value-added services and manufacturing and because that requires the best trained workforce in the world, our challenge is to unlock all the talents of all of the people of our country."
Albert Ellis, formerly of Harvey Nash, told Personnel Today: "This speech showed Brown's attention has gone back to skills.
"The Leitch Review set a monumental task, and the government's progress in achieving it has been slow because it has been preoccupied with the transition of power from Blair to Brown and competing with Cameron on tax policy."
