GFirst LEP goes for growth by skilling the Gloucestershire workforce

GFirst LEP and Serco Vocational Training will be using European funding to help employees across businesses in Gloucestershire to acquire vital skills to aid business growth.

As a priority, a number of workforce skills such as customer service, IT, managerial and linguistic skills have already been identified as major areas to tackle to help boost the county’s strengths in engineering and manufacturing, retail, leisure and tourism.

By securing European Social Funding, GFirst LEP in partnership with Serco Vocational Training, will be working with small, medium enterprise (SME) businesses across the county to deliver training to address these essential workforce skills and identify other training development areas such as specialist technical skills to help meet the demand for high quality niche products.

David Owen, Chief Executive, GFirst LEP said “Part of our ‘Growing Gloucestershire’ campaign is to ensure people in the county have the right skills to meet the needs of growing businesses across the area.” “Our partnership with Serco represents a tremendous opportunity to help meet the current and future workforce requirement across the county. This important initiative will help businesses to grow by having the right skills in place to fulfil their needs.”

Lesley Watson, Head of Apprenticeships, Serco commented: “We are delighted to be working with GFirst LEP on this project. This contract is unique, as this the first time that Local Enterprise Partnerships have played a critical role in determining the effective use of European funding at a local level.” “We will be closely working with the LEP and local businesses to meet workforce development needs across the county and will be delivering a variety of different training courses across using a range of subcontractors. By working in partnership with a range of diverse organisations, we strongly believe that we will be able to meet a priority need of the LEP’S Growing Gloucestershire Campaign by helping to develop the workforce skills that businesses need to help them grow.