A diverse and inclusive work and learning environment empowers young people, helps prepare them for work and provides employers with more choice when recruiting, said Neil Bentley-Gockmann, CEO of WorldSkills UK, one of the panellists at the third WorldSkills Conference Talks.
WorldSkills UK commissioned and published a study about diversity and inclusion in technical careers and apprenticeships. The findings were discussed during the July 8 conference coined Ensuring that skills reflect societies: Diversity and Inclusion in competitions and beyond.
“It’s about role modelling. It’s about being what you can see. It’s about tackling barriers to access. It’s about talking about the challenges openly and taking a leadership position on all of this and saying ‘whatever we’re doing just isn’t good enough,’ ” Bentley-Gockmann explained to international attendees. “We need to be harnessing more talent from all across society to help young people succeed in work and life and therefore to help the U.K. economy succeed. That is the same everywhere.”
Skills organizations, employers, industry and the educational sector are working on the same agenda when it comes to inclusion and diversity and WorldSkills can play a role, he added.
“As a convener of industry, education and governments around the world, there is an opportunity and a platform for WorldSkills to occupy a space which is bringing people together to drive this agenda forward,” said Bentley-Gockmann.
WorldSkills recognized there was a problem around gender diversity and particularly around young people from Black and ethnic minorities, said Bentley-Gockmann, adding they were not being as inclusive as they should be. They worked with an organization called Social Innovation Partnership and surveyed about 700 stakeholders.
“We could see that a lot of young people we were working with were white. There was gender segregation in terms of young women working in particular training programs and competitions like health and hair and beauty and young men tending to be in engineering and construction,” he pointed out. “We were also concerned that we weren’t really capturing a sense of young people we wanted to work with who may have been socially disadvantaged or young people who were identifying as LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender). With the training, competitions activity and the careers advice work that we are doing there is an onus on us to make sure that as many young people as possible can benefit.”
One challenge that came out of the research was how to reach and appeal to young people from diverse communities.
“There was a big concern about are we providing enough support to young women or young people from Black and ethnic minorities to really help them through the competition journey and reduce barriers to entering the competition,” said Bentley-Gockmann. “In response to Black Lives Matter we are looking at where young Black and ethnic minority communities may be disadvantaged in getting access to some of our programs and taking action on those particular areas.”
WorldSkills UK turned the research into a five-point plan.
“We have been working with our partners to make sure we are more attractive and inclusive in our registrations. Our more recent data from 2020 shows we are making progress in attracting more young people who are identifying as LGBT, more young people who are Black and from ethnic minority communities and more young people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds,” he noted. “But we are flatlining in terms of attracting young women into the competitions and particularly young women into engineering and construction competitions.”
WorldSkills also wants to practise what they preach as an employer, he added.
The organization undertook a comprehensive review of its human resource practices and policies looking at the diversity of the workforce and leadership team.
“We found we have a quite diverse and broad workforce: 45 per cent are women, 15 per cent are LGBT, a quarter are non-white and 12 per cent have a disability,” said Bentley-Gockmann. “But like many organizations, we are challenged from a leadership perspective and the leadership of the organization is currently four white men and that is the lack of diversity.
“There is a lot more we need to do to improve our diversity, but I always make a point there is diversity you can see and there is diversity you can’t see.”
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