October 2009

Welcome to the October issue of Skills Update. Autumn’s arrived and it’s college open day season with colourful banners and signs appearing on college gates across the country. No doubt you have a host of marketing activity underway to promote the benefits of skills and the vital role they play in keeping our lives moving forward.

Hopefully you will have found the Campaign Resources Site useful for your open day marketing. Remember there is a host of useful FREE collateral, branding and campaign tools available there for you to use. If you have ideas for collateral or materials that you’d find useful for your own campaigns, please share them with the Skills Campaign team.

New for download this month on the Campaign Resources Site is an at-a-glance guide to what learners experience when they call the Careers Advice Service phone line. Whether they want to learn new skills, change career or return to work, it demonstrates the value of the service, why keeping details up-to-date on the National Learning Directory is key, and how callers can be directed to colleges and learning providers.

In this month’s Skills Update, you’ll find:

• Details of forthcoming national marketing activity promoting the benefits of skills and how to get involved, broken down by the weeks and months to come
• Links to starter packs, toolkits, information, guidance and relevant collateral
• Updates on recent national campaign activity
• Up and coming key dates

The Skills Campaign team is always here to help so please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions on 020 7419 7335 or at skillscampaign@lsc.gov.uk.

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In the coming weeks...

So what’s coming up these next few weeks?

• Exciting news this month is that the Careers Advice Service has been invited to be a resident careers expert on The Guardian website. This will involve a Careers Coach, Paresh Damani answering a wide range of questions from adults looking to move on in their working life. This follows a successful live web chat providing advice around CVs. More great news is that guardian.co.uk is following the Careers Advice Service on Twitter – one of only 9 feeds it follows. You can follow it too on http://twitter.com/careers_advice1.
• The Careers Advice Service has also been approached by the online version of The Sun newspaper to be its resident careers expert and is in the process of nominating a Careers Coach to deliver advice to its online audience.
• Work is still underway on the new Careers Advice Service social media press room. Hosting press releases, podcasts, Twitter feeds, videos, webchats and a widget download, partners who sign up will have their sites automatically updated with new content. More details will follow in the November issue of Skills Update.
• A new Skills Accounts website www.direct.gov.uk/skillsaccounts goes live tomorrow complete with new look and feel, images, site navigation and additional functionality including a 'Skills Diagnostic Tool'. The new website has been - and will continue to be - informed by feedback from learners and stakeholders. Last week, students from Leicester College who don’t currently have a Skills Account tested the site thoroughly. The latest Skills Accounts e-bulletin is available tomorrow.
• Keep a look out on the Campaign Resources Site in November for new web resources to help learning and childcare providers and nextstep services to promote the Free Childcare for Training and Learning for Work scheme. As well as a branded web button and banner, there will be a new video to promote the scheme. Featuring Suzanne Shaw and a student that has benefited from Free Childcare, this video will also be promoted to parenting websites to raise awareness of the support available to eligible parents.
• There will also be further, targeted promotion of Free Childcare for Training and Learning for Work in November. The leaflet door drops that started on 26 October will continue until 15 November in the 15 key local areas that have the highest number of potential recipients. The latest version of the leaflet is available on the Campaign Resources Site.
• Digital display ads will continue until the end of December, targeting adults interested in Professional and Career Development Loans. The campaign will run on MSN, Prospects and ad network Specific Media with online keyword search activity continuing on Google.
• Posters will be going up in 400 sites in schools from 2-15 November to maintain awareness of Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA).
• The Train to Gain team is updating its Train to Survive leaflet for Business Link Advisers, colleges and providers which should be available to download on the Campaign Resources Site by mid-November and also from the warehouse at Granby. To order leaflets, email your request to lsc@granbymarketing.com quoting the reference number LSC-P-NAT-080224.
• Colleges Week 2009 is just around the corner and Sven Goran Eriksson has kicked the week off with a fantastic competition – details follow below.

Colleges Week (9-15 November)
England’s college students are being given the opportunity to step into the large shoes of Sven Goran Eriksson and Stuart Rose as a nationwide competition gets underway to see what life is like at the top of some of the UK’s most exciting industries.

‘I’m running the show’ is giving college students the chance to shadow some of the UK’s most influential people. These exclusive experiences will enable winners to go behind the scenes for the day, explore what skills and attributes are needed to be successful and consider what they would do if they were in charge. Winners will be announced during Colleges Week and the successful students will have the opportunity to talk tactics with Sven Goran Eriksson, chat to an astronaut, go behind the scenes at Top Santé or shadow Marks and Spencer chief executive, Stuart Rose. For more information on the competition and for a full list of prizes, please visit www.collegesweek.org.

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Planning ahead

Here’s what’s happening in the months to come:

• By the end of December, the ‘Our future. It’s in our hands.’ web content will migrate fully to the Careers Advice Service website. If your website currently carries a link to the CONSUMER area of the ‘Our future. It’s in our hands.’ website, you will need to redirect your link to http://www.careersadvice.direct.gov.uk/ourhands accordingly. This does not affect you if you link to the EMPLOYER/Skills Pledge page/s.
• Skills Pledge will soon announce to the media its 20,000th employer and 7 millionth learner.
• The call to action for Skills Pledge will change to the Business Link website at the end of November.

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Updates and news

In this section, catch up with campaign news and updates:

• In October, a new range of Skills Pledge marketing materials for employers, providers and Business Link Advisers went live on the Campaign Resources Site. Designed to help improve understanding of the Skills Pledge and enable employers to effectively communicate its benefits to other employers, materials include:
  • Templates - case studies, press releases and factsheet
  • PR guide and case study guidelines
  More information is available from nighat.mashhadi@lsc.gov.uk.
• The Skills for Life Get On campaign launched its 2010 football chant competition with an additional World Cup chant category. For more information, please visit www.direct.gov.uk/geton
• On 20 October, BIS hosted an event to celebrate 10 years of Skills including a short film developed by the Skills for Life team highlighting 10 successful campaign years.
• The Skills for Life Get On campaign Black and minority ethnic (BME) advertising campaign evaluation is complete and shows some extremely encouraging findings. General awareness of advertising that encourages people to gain new skills among BME audiences stands at two-thirds. Since the advertising, attitudes to learning and Maths have improved with these BME audiences seeing education as investment in the future rising from 75% to 82% and those wanting to further their qualifications rising from 67% to 73%. Those who recognise that being better at Maths can make a real difference in people’s lives now stands at 88%, having risen from 73%. Response to the TV campaign was very positive with highest recognition of the adverts amongst the Caribbean sample. Also two thirds of people who viewed the adverts agreed it would be easy to improve their Maths skills.
• The Skills for Life Get On campaign Sainsbury’s partnership took place in 9 stores across England in October. Information about improving general Maths and English skills was distributed from stands manned by the LSC, nextstep advisers and local colleges. Initial feedback has been very positive, with further evaluation due to take place.
• Autumn has been a busy time for the National Skills Academy with the launch of two new academies. The National Enterprise Academy, led by BBC TV dragon Peter Jones, was launched by Jones and Business Secretary Lord Mandelson on 21 September. The Academy will enrol nearly 18,000 learners in its first five years, giving young people and older learners the skills and confidence to become enterprising employees or entrepreneurs in their own right. Plans for PR and online marketing activity are being finalised with details to follow in the next issue of Skills Update.
• 13 October saw the launch of the National Skills Academy for Social Care by Skills Minister Kevin Brennan and Care Services Minister Phil Hope - the network’s 13th active academy and first in the public sector, supported by the Department of Health. It will target learning support and training practice to 1.5 million adult social care workers and 35,000 employers in England, with a particular emphasis on small and medium-sized organisations with limited training and development budgets.
• On 9 October, 20 certificated providers took part in a research workshop to measure the success of the Training Quality Standard’s first year. Results were shared with providers and discussions held on marketing the Standard to employers.
• The Training Quality Standard team attended the World of Learning exhibition at the NEC on 30 September/1 October, speaking to a number of large employers interested in applying for the Standard for their in-house provision, as well as wanting to know more about why they should look for it when buying in training. Private sector providers informed the team that, increasingly, public sector organisations are looking for the Standard when issuing tenders for training provision. Plans for PR and online marketing activity are being finalised and details will follow in the next edition.
• Finally, the Train to Gain team is calling for case studies, especially those which demonstrate employers recognising the value of co-investing or funding training themselves. Please contact shagufta.mustafa@lsc.gov.uk if you can help.

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National Apprenticeship Service
On 22 October, the National Apprenticeship Service launched the ‘Good for Business’ campaign which will run until the end of November and then again in January and February, coinciding with Apprenticeship Week. The campaign’s objective is to increase the number of Apprenticeships available, in particular to those aged 16-18. Marketing and communication efforts will focus on public and private sector employers to engage and explain the business benefits that apprentices can bring to an organisation.

This continues work started in February / March this year with the Sir Alan Sugar TV advertising campaign which was extremely successful in raising awareness and employer interest in Apprenticeships. The campaign will focus ‘below the line’ to convert high levels of interest into leads and more Apprenticeship places.

The theme, Good for Business, has been tested with groups of employers who liked the style and directness of the messaging and design. National and regional press and radio advertising will be used alongside PR, Digital and Direct Marketing. Providers and colleges can download new ‘Good for Business’ collateral and other employer focused materials from the Campaign Resources Site.

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Key dates:

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