Shaping the Future of Skills: Insights from the Workforce Foresighting Hub Workshops

The objectives

The objectives of the workshops were designed to:

• Demonstrate the data insights already uncovered and provide demos of the visualisation tools and reports.
• Gather feedback and suggestions to refine the data and its presentation, ensuring wider adoption.
• Build a community where educators and skills providers feel heard and empowered to shape solutions for the future.

In attendance

A wide range of organisations and professionals attended the workshops, including representatives from Further and Higher Education institutions, commercial training providers, Institutes of Technology, skills bodies, awarding bodies, the Association of Colleges, and the Catapult Network. Attendees held roles such as curriculum designers, curriculum leads, programme directors, heads of curriculum, Operations Directors, Future Skills Leads, each directly involved in shaping, validating, and assuring the quality of educational programmes to meet industry demand.

The agenda

The sessions followed a structured agenda, beginning with an introduction to the WF Hub. Participants then explored their current approaches to curriculum mapping and shared feedback on existing practices. This was followed by a demonstration of the WF Hub’s current insights and reports, including the data visualisation tool and a real world case study. Finally, attendees were introduced to the new Insights Explorer Portal, with an opportunity to provide feedback on how well it supports educators in understanding future skills demands.

Feedback Gathered from the Workshop Sessions

When considering curriculum mapping attendees discussed the range of tools currently in use, such as Skills GPT, the Skills England Dashboard, LSIP, Vector & Lightcast, EMSI, and direct engagement with industry. However, several challenges were identified, including the reactive nature of curriculum development, limited ability to forecast future skills demand, slow adaptation due to high delivery costs, fragmented data systems, and a lack of clarity from employers about future needs. A key takeaway was the need for a unified, strategic view that would enable more proactive curriculum planning and help avoid duplication of effort.

When exploring the current use of tools, attendees recognised the value of aligning with national and local strategies, gaining sector-specific insights, and supporting careers guidance and modular programme development. Participants suggested broadening data sources, simplifying outputs, enhancing forecasting capabilities, formalising partnerships with awarding bodies and regional authorities, and ensuring that standards are future proofed.

After two productive discussions, the new WF Hub portal and interface was introduced, which was met with strong interest and enthusiasm for future development. Colleges and Institutes of Technology expressed a keen desire to participate in beta testing and saw significant potential for the portal to support career guidance and collaboration across the sector. Attendees also emphasised the importance of robust validation and governance, as well as the need to support the re-validation of standards, integrate non-standard data sources, and establish processes for ongoing improvement.

Feedback and Insights

To capture a rich mix of perspectives, we spoke with several attendees during the in-person workshop at the NCC in Bristol. Their full interviews are available to watch below, but here are a few standout moments and insights that resonated most strongly.

George Round, Curriculum Area Manager for Engineering, Yeovil College

The insight we’ve been given today with that dashboard is going to be extremely useful particularly given how quickly the education sector changes, having a degree of information ahead of the game, can help us start to map that more carefully and clearly.

Donna Kenny, Strategic Lead for Skills and Technical Education, IOT West of England

The data and the dashboard we have seen today which is looking at the skills that will be needed in the future, is an absolutely great tool and in terms of supporting us further, it would be great to have more insight into how we can use that tool with our partners in a more practical way.

Lucy Hawkins, Group Director – Future Skills, UCS College Group

The programme is really important for us as educators, and I think also more broadly across industry. It can make a fantastic difference because it is collating that information into one place, it’s helping us to inform our curriculum planning, it’s helping us have those valuable conversations with employers and it’s helping us to collaborate as education providers and making sure we are delivering the right skills for the future.

Micaela Owen, Head of Skills, NCC

In order to address the future skills, the future technologies coming down the pipe, we need to engage more with the future technologies coming in and the Workforce Foresighting Hub does this so well because they pull all the right people into the room at the same time so we can make sure that the Horizon 2 challenges are identified, addressed and ultimately met.

Claire Arbery, Head of Workforce Transformation Programmes, NCC

It’s listening to what employers want from you as an education provider and how you can actually help to solve those problems. But it really is a joint working effort. There’s no point in you providing a solution that doesn’t answer their problems.

Darran Marks, Operations Director, Greater Birmingham and Solihull Institute of Technology

We know there are skills deficits, we know the skill shortages, and we have to try to identify the best pathways to try and put higher technical skills back into our workforce. The Hub’s vision should be supported by industry and education by showcasing and supporting outcomes from the use of the Hub’s work.

In conclusion

The workshops have been instrumental in helping to shape the direction of the WF Hub. The feedback gathered will directly inform the development of new tools and features, ensuring that the hub remains responsive to the evolving needs of educators, skills providers, and industry partners.

Steve Picker, Technical Lead, Workforce Foresighting Hub:

For the UK to remain competitive, it needs to adopt new technologies. The WF Hub captures that critical insight of how new technology impacts organisational capabilities and we then help the supply chain understand how they need to adapt. In addition, we work with educators to understand how their products need to change to enable the future state and provide the right skills and behaviours to prepare the workforce to deliver those new capabilities.

Emily Brennan, Communications Manager, Workforce Foresighting Hub, concludes:

This programme is critical because we need to encourage technology adoption in the UK. We can only achieve mass technology adoption if we have the right skills in place. Until we can send out earlier demand signals, which is what the Workforce Foresighting Hub programme is trying to do there is always going to be a lag between skills development, demand signals and therefore, technology adoption. That is what the WF Hub is trying to close.

The collaborative spirit and practical insights shared by participants at the Workforce Foresighting Educators’ Workshops will help ensure that the UK’s workforce is prepared for the challenges and opportunities arising in the future.