Keynote talk from Pathway2Employability National Conference, Lingayen, Philippines, 3-4 April 2024

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Establishing a Skills Ecosystem for
Sustained Success: What, Why, and How?
Professor Gary C Wood, Academic Director
New Model Institute for Technology & Engineering, Hereford, UK
gary.wood@nmite.ac.uk | www.garycwood.uk

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• What is a Skills Ecosystem?
• Why is a Skills Ecosystem a useful concept after PATHWAY?
• Characteristics of an Skills Ecosystem
• Establishing and developing a Skills Ecosystem?
• Future Skills and changes ahead
• Some case studies
– Sheffield
– NMITE
• Q&A.
Overview

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• ‘Skills ecosystem’ coined by Finegold (1999)
• Stakeholders in a region or industry sector working to use, share
and develop their skills and knowledge in mutually beneficial ways,
and for the benefit of people external to the network
• Include industry, organisations, community, Government, local
authorities and policy makers, individuals, education and training
providers
• Once established, not owned or led by an individual organisation –
operates independently.
What is a Skills Ecosystem?

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● PATHWAY has created partnerships between industry and
education
● It has enabled you to begin:
– enhancing students’ skills and workplace-readiness
– having an impact on the businesses
– Working and learning together between universities, employers and
government.
Why a Skills Ecosystem after PATHWAY?

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● Using a Skills Ecosystem approach can help you to:
– Build on your impact
– Make the network self-sustainable as the project ends
– Bring new people into the network organically
– Ensure universities maintain up-to-date understanding of skills and
industry needs as these change over time
– Identify training needs for university staff to support these
developments
– Help you to contextualise students’ learning, which facilitates their
discovering their agency with technical knowledge, so they
understand how to put it to work in employment contexts.
Why a Skills Ecosystem after PATHWAY?

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1. Stakeholders are committed to a broad agenda, not (just) their own
interests
• Regional development or development of their industry
• Upskilling the future workforce and building a talent pipeline
• Networking and sharing expertise
• NOT just solving a problem that’s specific to their business
2. Have a genuine focus on improving business performance
• Motivation for people and organisations to involve is to improve
business/prospects
• In turn, this improves the regional economy.
Characteristics of a Skills Ecosystem

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3. Self-sustaining networks, shaped by stakeholders working together
• Developed ecosystems are not owned by any individual or organisation
• Stakeholders contribute and draw value from the ecosystem without a
central co-Ordinator
• May require planning/structure/control at the beginning
4. Address both demand for and supply of skills/knowledge, closing
gap between provision of skills and need for them
• Demand – requirements from employers
• Supply – recruitment and retention, linked to education and training
• Focus on how knowledge and skills are used, not just creating them.
Characteristics of a Skills Ecosystem

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5. Interdisciplinarity
• Bring together people/organisations with different expertise
• Move away from knowledge-based learning to build competencies – i.e.
breadth of development, not just depth
6. Often closely linked to economic development of the
region/industry sector
• Enhances productivity and supports business growth
• Economic development is often the reason policymakers are interested
in trying to stimulate skills ecosystems.
Characteristics of a Skills Ecosystem

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7. Aligned with adapting to rapid change, and driving innovation
• Ecosystems can emerge from changing needs bringing people together
• Established ecosystems support the change
• Provide a mechanism for resilience and future-proofing.
(See Clayton 2016; NSW Department of Education & Training 2008)
Characteristics of a Skills Ecosystem

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‘Skills ecosystems must be regionally integrated, highly diverse, with
some stable formal institutions at their core that can fulfil the full
range of critical functions in educating for skills alongside supporting
graduate work placement, innovation, business networks, consultancy
and cultural leadership. Our case is that modern universities are
strong and lasting multi-functional institutions where many of the
other players are more fragile.”
(Wise 2015)
Successful Skills Ecosystems

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Formality of Skills Ecosystems
Formal Informal
Development Mechanism
Planned and structured approach
Created deliberately
Particular aims and objectives
Finegold (1999) creating high value
enterprises
Organic
Unplanned, emergent approach
More general aims and objectives
Characteristics

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• Finegold (1999) defined and describes requirements for a skills
ecosystem, rooted in natural ecology metaphor (examples from
Buchanan 2001):
1. A catalyst – e.g. government investment or demand from industry
2. Fuel or nourishment – e.g. universities supplying high quality
graduates and access to venture capital
3. Supportive host environment – environmental conditions that enables
growth and maturity, e.g. telecoms, international airports, tech parks,
regulation that encourages risk-taking
4. High degree of interdependence – collaboration between members of
the ecosystem, to aid learning, adaptation and development.
Establishing a Skills Ecosystem

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• The Catalyst
• Some stimulus required to get started
• Bring stakeholders together around that stimulus
• Select stakeholders with different knowledge and skills, or need to develop
them
• Can you secure further investment from government, either financially or in
policy terms?
• Fuel or nourishment
• Foster generous sharing of knowledge and skills, and identify gaps
• Your skills and entrepreneurship programmes are critical here – make
sure your graduates can articulate their skills in industry-relevant ways
How to develop a Skills Ecosystem from PATHWAY?

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• Supportive environment
• How are members of your ecosystem supporting each other?
• What’s the leadership required to stimulate the right environment? You’ve
got the key players in this project…
• Interdependence
• Identify and build on opportunities for mutual benefit
• Disseminate and share outcomes widely, to bring others in
• Focus on the value and need rather than skills per se – aim to achieve
something together and let the skills development follow that.
How to develop a Skills Ecosystem from PATHWAY?

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• Talking about skills ecosystems often leads to a focus on education
and training. Don’t lose sight of research and knowledge exchange
activity too
• Applied research and knowledge exchange – from universities – is
important in stimulating enterprises and in turn that leads to more
employment opportunities and higher-skilled work (Finegold 1999)
• Think about how other education providers fit into the ecosystem –
not just universities
• Finegold (1999) notes that creating a high-skills ecosystem doesn’t
provide opportunities for lower-skilled workers – need to address that
separately and bring them in, by creating pipelines.
Important considerations

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• Universities have a role to play in helping uncover and localise
needs
• Often businesses are not good at articulating (future) need - think
about what you can do to stimulate understanding
• National imperatives are often insensitive to the local needs.
Universities (and the ecosystem) can help to make sense of them in a
local context ((McGrath & Lugg 2012, cited in Wedekind, et al 2021).
Important considerations

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‘Universities are well placed to support the creation of more effective skills
ecosystems at the regional level. … crucially, an ecosystem is not just a
supply system … universities also have a key role in working with
businesses and organisations to shape the demand for skills, innovating,
rethinking the design of business processes and jobs themselves.’
(Wise 2016)
Responding to Change

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• Lots of current thought leadership about foreseen disruption to kind
of skills employees will need in the future workplace:
• ‘We are trying to tackle the ‘wicked’ problem of preparing students for
jobs that do not yet exist, using technologies that have not yet been
invented, in order to solve problems that we do not know are problems
yet’ (Jackson 2008)
• Much literature argues that current employment and education
sectors are not positioned to meet demands of the future
• Skills required are not consistently defined – there is still debate
and discussion, but being intra-/entrepreneurial will help: authentic
problem-solving, innovation & creativity, risk-taking, taking action,
true collaboration.
Future Skills

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Future Skills
(McKinsey & Manyika
2017)

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• Brought together key stakeholders (businesses, council, community
groups, students, academics)
• Catalyst was adoption of Internet of Things technologies and
exploring how they could have an impact, with broad themes as a
stimulus…
Case Study 1: Sheffield

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Sheffield: Broad themes as a stimulus
Stakeholders
Education
Industry
Government
etc
Stimulus themes (examples)
Industry 4.0 Sustainability Smart Places Healthcare etc

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• Industry 4.0 adoption – addressing the decline in manufacturing by
removing barriers to digitalisation particularly for SMEs
• Health and Social Care – tackling challenges in social care, mental
health and wellbeing through identifying barriers to adoption of
digital, and prototyping solutions
• Food security and sustainability – building competitive local food
systems and exploring ways in which large scale agritech can be
adapted for smaller local farms
• …
Sheffield: Examples of student projects

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• Students greatly value the experience (Habbershaw, Sharp & Wood
2019):
• ‘Focus shifts from grades to output value’
• ‘Connects learning to applications – we can practise and recognise value’
• Develop professional skills and recognise their agency in using
knowledge and skills
• Value to industry:
• ‘The students came from multiple disciplines … [they] bring new
skillsets and help us innovate, using new ways of thinking. … The
business has changed. We look at things in a new way. We’re looking at
how we can actually introduce some of the changes that the students
have suggested.’
Sheffield: Learning together and sharing learning

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• A new university, founded in 2021
• Engineering and technology focus, with an applied approach –
industry-linked, challenge-led learning
• Degree programmes designed in collaboration with industry but also
aligned to Engineering Council standards – work-ready graduates
• Industry in learning experiences – projects, mentors, guest talks,
and as sponsors of students’ dissertation projects at Bachelor and
Master level
• Ensures graduates meet industry needs and demands
• Creates recruitment pipelines – employers get to meet and shape
their future talent.
Case Study 2: NMITE

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• Understanding where industry is vs. potential allows us to build
local economy through CPD/training for employers/businesses
• We are creating a Skills Hub to do this:
• A space to experience the future – using digital tools
• Training and development of skills for industry partners – ensuring
their future-readiness
• Innovation, enterprise and entrepreneurship support
• Digital skills
• This creates businesses with the right opportunities for our new
graduates, and we want to retain them in the region.
NMITE: A better understanding of regional skills needs

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• Learnings applied to curriculum development
• Creating the conditions for entrepreneurship
• New projects and relationships, including KE and research
• Student placements, internships, graduate roles, etc.
• Access to new funding
• Skills transfer/building capability across enterprises of all sizes
• Promotes innovation by collaborating on developing solutions
• Increased confidence for students and industry
• Demand based education vs. building capacity – not just
graduates/education leavers, but the right fit for industry.
Conclusion: Value of an Ecosystem to Universities

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Buchanan, J., Schofield, K., Briggs, C., Considine., Hager, P., Hawke, G., Kitay, J., Meagher, G., Macintyre,
J., Mounier, A., & Ryan, S. (2001). Beyond Flexibility: Skills and Work in the Future. Sydney: New South
Wales Board of Vocational Education and Training
Clayton, R. (2016). Building Innovation Ecosystems in Education to Reinvent School: A Study of Innovation
and System Change in the USA. London: Winston Churchill Memorial trust.
Finegold, D. (1999). Creating Self-Sustaining, High-Skill Ecosystems. Oxford Review of Economic Policy,
15(1), 60–81.
Jackson, N. (2008). Tackling the Wicked Problem of Creativity in Higher Education. SCEPTrE: Surrey
Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education.
McGrath, S., & Lugg, R. (2012). Knowing and doing vocational education and training reform: Evidence,
learning and the policy process. International Journal of Educational Development, 32(5), 696-708.
McKinsey & Company, & Manyika, J. (2017). Technology, jobs, and the future of work. McKinsey Insights.
NSW Department of Education & Training (2008). Skills in Context: A Guide to the Skill Ecosystem
Approach to Workforce Development. Sydney: NSW Department of Education & Training.
Wedekind, V., Russon, J., Ramsarup, P., Monk, D., Metelerkamp, L., & McGrath, S. (2021). Conceptualising
regional skills ecosystems: Reflections on four African cases. International Journal of Training &
Development, 24:347-362.
Wise, G. (2016). Developing Productive Places: The role of universities in skills ecosystems. London:
University Alliance
References

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Establishing a Skills Ecosystem for
Sustained Success: What, Why, and How?
Professor Gary C Wood, Academic Director
New Model Institute for Technology & Engineering, Hereford, UK
gary.wood@nmite.ac.uk | www.garycwood.uk