Member Article

CBI and Aspire join forces

CBI Director-General Richard Lambert will join forces this week with the new chief executive of Aspire, Mary Coyle, to encourage more employers to engage with young people in the North East.

The event is the first CBI North East debate of 2007 and is an opportunity for Aspire to promote its campaign to employers to get them to help young people realise their career potential in the region. The debate will cover how businesses can best engage with schools and the panel will include senior figures from the region’s leading businesses and education services. They will consider how businesses can interact with young people while they are still in education to increase their aspirations and levels of ‘employability’.

Mr Lambert said: “To maintain the UK’s prosperity and growth in the modern world, employers at every level, be it local, regional or international, need a highly skilled workforce. It is only by identifying the skills we need and by engaging with young people to encourage them to train and develop themselves that this will be achieved. “I hope the debate provokes employers into thinking in new ways about how they can reach out to young people and uncover a wealth of good ideas for them to tap in to.”

Ms Coyle said: “The debate will form a crucial part of Aspire’s aim for the coming year to encourage employers to directly influence the aspirations of young people. “A lot of businesses are doing great things to recruit and train young people but this information needs to be shared if more businesses are to get involved in shaping the next generation of employees, managers and leaders to carry their business forward.”

CBI North East and the North East Chamber of Commerce jointly own the Aspire campaign which aims to stem the flow of young people from the North East going to other areas of the UK to pursue a career. The debate will be formally opened by Jim Ferris, chief executive of the Percy Hedley Foundation, at Northern Counties School on Great North Road at 12.30pm on Friday, February 2.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .