 Fawr, ddwybod i gyfnod, ac rwy'n gweithio gydag y 10 ym Mhwylwyr 2021 o'r Cymru a Gweithfawr Cymru. Rwy'n cymdeithasol i gyfnod yma, oedd y ddwybod i gydag ym Mhwylwyr. Rwy'n cymdeithasol i gydag ym Mhwylwyr i gydag ym Mhwylwyr, oedd ym Gwylwyr i gydag Paul Sweeney i gydag John Mason, oedd yn gweithio gydag ym Mhwylwyr i gydag Clare Baker i Gwylwyr i Gwylwyr i Gwylwyr, oedd yn gweithio Gwylwyr i amgylchedd mewn Gwylwyr i Senguol, oedd yn Gwylwyr i Gwylwyr i Gydag Cob 26 i Glasgow. Rwy'n gweithio amgylchedd mewn Gwylwyr i Gwylwyr i Gydag a Chymru a'r Gwylwyr i Gydag ym Mhwylwyr i Gydag ym Mhwylwyr i Gydag ym Mhwylwyr i Gydag ym Gwylwyr, oedd yn gweithio gydag ym Gwylwyr i Gydag ym Gwylwyr i Gydag ym Mhwylwyr i Gydag Llywodraeth yma, oedd ein gofyn nhw i gydag yn rhawnol. Can I call on Paul Sweeney to declare any relevant interests? Thank you, convener. I have no relevant interests to declare. Thank you. John Mason. Thank you. No, I have nothing to declare either. Thank you very much. In that case, we move straight on to agenda item two, which is the decision on taking business in private. Our next item of business is to agree that we take item four, which is a discussion of evidence heard and next steps in private. Are members content to take this item in private? Thank you. In that case, we move straight on to agenda item three, the evidence session. And our main item of business this morning is the first evidence session on our inquiry into Scotland's supply chain. This is the committee's first inquiry. We decided that we wanted to consider the short and medium term structural challenges facing Scotland's supply chains. We are interested in looking at how the challenges and skills in supply chains are impacting Scotland's economy. We want to look at how to build future resilience and whether there are opportunities to develop domestic supply chains. We are structuring the inquiry around the three themes of people, places and product. Today's session will focus on the first of these themes, people. Looking at the demand for skills, can I thank you for our panel for joining us today and you are welcome. I would like to welcome Katie Haydenrach, supply chain and operations director of oil and gas UK, Paul Hunter, lecturer and specialist professional in human resource management and organisational behaviour, University of Glasgow, Adam Smith Business School, Mark Logan, startup and scale-up adviser, Scottish Government and Melanie Sims, professor of work and employment, University of Glasgow, Adam Smith Business School. Now, there is no need for anyone to touch any of the buttons, speak buttons, anything, that will all be done for you. I am going to propose that we just move straight into questions and I will ask the first question here. How significant are the skills and labour shortages affecting Scotland's economy and are there sectors or regions facing a particularly acute challenge? I will maybe ask Katie Haydenrach to come in on that one. Thank you. Certainly from the oil and gas industry's perspective, the skills gap is not as acute as it was a decade ago. Since then, we have seen production reducing. There has been impact to commodity prices and Covid has hit the industry really hard. We are working hard on the recovery but, as I am sure you can understand, the subsequent contraction in the industry and the reduction in demand has meant that the skills gap is much less than it was. Mark Logan, if he has a comment on that. Sure. I am going to, in this discussion, represent the digital and technology sectors. We definitely have a significant growing skills gap in Scotland in this area, in my view. We consider that the sector, in terms of its importance to the economy, is for almost every country growing rapidly. We have acute shortages in start-ups and larger organisations that are concerned with native digital product development. That is undoubtedly constraining our ability to create new start-ups, to scale them and, for that matter, to attract larger corporates to set up shop here in Scotland. We can talk more about this as the meeting goes on, but it is certainly an area, in my view, that has a severe skill shortage. Perhaps Melanie Simms. The two previous speakers have hit on particular sectoral issues that are relevant to their specific sectors, and individual sectors are facing quite different challenges and different dynamics. That is something that some of those conversations do not capture enough. You can look at any particular sector and across Scotland, regional areas. The hospitality sector in some regions is suffering and in other regions suffering less. There is complexity and dynamics, which play out differently across different sectors and areas of the country. What we also need to remember is that there are skills mismatches, so not necessarily skills gaps, but the skills that we have as a workforce as a whole—whether that is in a sector occupation, local labour market or whatever that is—do not necessarily match what employers want and need. One of my areas of expertise is understanding how employers engage with the process of planning and policymaking in this area of skills, gaps and skills mismatches. One of the things that employers, organisations and employers tell me consistently is that we have some gaps, but that is often a mismatch rather than a lack of—is it a match or is it the wrong people in the wrong places rather than necessarily the wrong skills when we look at aggregate level? I think that Katie wants to come back in. Thank you very much. Recognise the comments that some of my fellow panellists have made and certainly digital skills is a gap that we are starting to see emerging. The industry is investing quite heavily in innovation, digitalisation and Covid has accelerated some of that, for example, through the use of remote operations. We are seeing gaps emerging right from basic digital literacy through to data analytics, and that is something that we anticipate will only continue to grow as the industry advances. I think that the previous panellists have probably highlighted the key issues with the skills gaps in particular areas and the misalignment of skills. That raises questions about the nature of education and the nature of collaboration between educators and industry. I am very much engaged with what is occurring in the Netherlands where there are economic boards where employers, universities and municipalities work very closely together to identify what skills gaps exist and to ensure that those skills are best aligned to industry. That is possibly an avenue of exploration, but the key issue is having more collaboration between the key stakeholders and ensuring that students or participants in education at any level are being taught particular skills and attributes that employers are looking for. We need to know precisely what employers are looking for. There needs to be a stronger connection between those stakeholders. I think that Mark Logan wants to come back in. I think that building on what Katie was saying a few moments ago, I think that it is important in Scotland that we understand and use the term digital skills, that we understand that can mean very different things in different contexts. If you think of that as a spectrum, at one end of the scale, there is basically digital literacy among our citizens. I think that we all recognise that there is work to do there to get an adequate level of digital literacy across the population. Along that spectrum, you come to the digital literacy of businesses. We have seen, because of Covid, that there has been an acceleration of digital literacy among many businesses so that they could continue to operate. That is its own challenging problem. At the far end of the spectrum are the digitally-native businesses. Those are the businesses that make products or services that are inherently digital in nature—software, software and hardware—for example, such as sky scanners, fan jewels, current health, those types of companies and many more. Fulfilling that need is its own peculiarities. In that area in particular, we have some very significant work to do to get adequacy in Scotland. We do understand the skills that employers require in that sector, because they are pretty easy to state, but we are not supplying them. Even though we have a small population and there is always going to be an upper supply limit there, we are doing a bad job in summary in Scotland to cite that context of supplying the numbers that we could, and that is throttling our ability to grow industry in the modern economy. That is an area of particular concern from my perspective. In the discussion so far, it has brought out my next question partly, which is about the key skills that a demand is likely to increase in the future. Obviously, IT is an obvious one, but there are other skills that perhaps need to be matched to the labour market. Demographic changes in the labour market may impact. Reduced access to the European labour market, all of those are having an impact on our chain, if you like, of skills and labour. Outside of the broad sweep of technology, the pressures are going to come in the future. I put the R in to address the previous point, but the key for me is leadership. There needs to be a focus on soft skills so that we or students' participants in education can adapt quickly to a changing market. That is very important. I am heavily involved in leadership education at an executive level. Critical thinking is also important. Of course, it is not just about the hard digital skills that we have just discussed. It is ensuring that we are looking at inner development goals, which is what the Nordic countries focus on. That is important because there is a danger that we equip students with a narrow set of hard technical skills that may or may not be relevant when they leave their education. Of course, there needs to be a focus on their education, but there needs to be that agility as well. That is a mindset that needs to be created and developed within those entrants into the labour market. Of course, there are other hard areas that manufacturing skills and so on, but manufacturing is a huge area. What manufacturing skills should we be focused on? Should we be linked with manufacturing to sustainability industry, for example, with the First Minister who called yesterday announcing a new manufacturing facility? What specific areas of manufacturing do we need to focus on in particular? What strategy, for example, does the Scottish Government have in terms of attracting particular types of industry? That needs to be communicated to universities, vocational colleges and technical colleges, so that they can plan ahead. That comes back to the previous point of that need for constant collaboration and communication. Can I maybe bring Melanie Simms in now? Thank you. I agree with much of what Paul said. I think that that is often how the debate is framed. What does our economy and labour market look like now? How do we anticipate that changing and developing? However, there is another dynamic that we need to throw into the mix, which is to recognise that what jobs look like are the function of choices in individual workplaces and organisations. I do not think that there is any inevitability that, for example, the large number of what we call low-skill jobs are mainly low-paid jobs in sectors such as care, retail and hospitality, which is where a huge bulk of our employment is in Scotland and across the UK. I do not think that there is any inevitability that those are jobs with relatively few opportunities for progression and skills development in the way that they are now. We have a responsibility, as people who research in this area and engage in policymaking in this area, to push a discussion that says where is the responsibility of employers in that space and what pressures, what levers can we use to ensure that those jobs are really as good jobs as they can be? They may be relatively low of hate, even if there are opportunities for skills development and training, but those are jobs where there are relatively few opportunities for training and progression at the moment. We need to ask those questions, which is a slightly different take on the question and shaping it more as saying, what can we do to ensure that those jobs are the best jobs that they can be? Can I bring Mark Logan in at this point? Thank you. I have a comment on the question that was originally phrased or framed. Looking forward to what skill sets do we need to be anticipating and how is that going to develop, I think that it is important to note that the rate of change in society and in industry is increasing almost exponentially. I think that the ability for us to guess what skills are going to be relevant in 20 years' time is an extremely difficult task. I think that it is more important that, in the release of some comments that Paul made, it is more important to develop the capability for people to be entrepreneurial and flexible and adaptable. We have an education system at the moment that assumes that we are going to do one job for life. You exit that education system at some point with a degree or a college certificate or some hires, etc. The idea is that that should be essentially qualified. You will get life experience, but that should be formally qualified. That is utterly out of touch with the reality that all of us have even experienced in our lifetimes, but certainly our children are going to experience it. We have to think about how our young people develop that flexible entrepreneurial mindset that allows them to adapt to opportunities and challenges. I am sure that a lot of those come up. We have to regularly reskill. We have to recognise that on-going reskilling is valid as the qualification that you got 40 years ago when you graduated, but we do not today. As regards further challenges, I think that in our universities we have lost about 50 per cent of our European graduates after Brexit or undergraduates have become graduates. Many of them stayed because they could before and populated our businesses. You want to think of Skyscanner where I was a CEO for five years. That is not a technical point of making. Our marketing teams, our sales teams, and many of those people were from Europe and were selling into Europe on our behalf. Scotland has to think about how we should not be standing and destroying ourselves in the head that Brexit was. How do we attract key skills into the country? At that rate of change that I am describing, we will not be able to fully scale ourselves. We will have to bring in expertise to help us to form industries that can compete. Katie, do you have a comment on that? Yes, thank you. Some of Mark's comments about flexibility and adaptability and that notion that there is a job for life and picking up on your original question on what skills we anticipate. The work that we are doing as part of the North Sea transition deal will see us through the energy skills alliance being able to articulate how we see the skills demand for the future. It will take time for the carbon capture storage, the hydrogen industries to develop. It is vital that we have a managed transition towards net zero so that people in the workforce today and the young people who are looking at what opportunities there are for them in the future can see how roles will change over the course of their career. They can see that they have a long and secure future in the current industry, which is changing and which will be vital to helping the country to reach its net zero ambitions. Thank you. Can I just bring Melanie MacDonald back in briefly? Very briefly. To emphasise and support what Katie has just said, that is a sector that has a very strong idea about collective skills planning and really does engage stakeholders, and that is certainly not evident in all sectors. I think that there are some important lessons to learn there. To quickly make the point about risk, part of the discussion here is about who bears the risk of that rapid change. We are in a context where too often the risk falls on the individual worker and certainly to upskill and to invest in their upskilling sometimes in actual hard cash. We need to have a system that is more shared essentially between the state and employers and the individuals. It is certainly not as much in the individual direction as in England, but we still have some sectors where the risks of upskilling across your career lie with the individual. Paul, very briefly, I know that you want to come back in. Yeah, thank you. With regards to Mark's point about entrepreneurial skills, for example, the Peter Jones Foundation does a lot of excellent work in collaboration with colleges and universities to try to improve young people's entrepreneurial abilities from an age of eight. I think that that needs to be looked at. In terms of being a higher educator, I see a lot of students coming through with a complete lack of social media, but many of them cannot operate a spreadsheet. I am just wondering why that is the case in terms of why they are coming into level 1 and level 2 university, and why they are lacking these basic skills. Jamie Halcro Johnston would like to come in on the back of that. Thank you very much. It was just some really interesting points there. I had a question on the back of it, or questions on the back of that very briefly. If I could maybe go to Professor Sims and then to Paul Hunter on these. Obviously, the decision, the vote for that to leave the EU was in 2016. We've had a number of years knowing that in some form or another, and I understand the arguments that there was an uncertainty on what the exact deal was going to be, but there has been that period of time to prepare. Do you think that, looking at the Scottish context, because obviously that's what we're looking at, do you think that both Scottish Government and agencies and also the industries and sectors in Scotland have done enough to or have been proactive enough at looking and engaging on what the impacts of leaving the EU may be and what we needed to do in terms of ensuring that the kind of people supply chain was there? And can I also ask, just in terms of small businesses, we know that there's an issue in terms of small businesses recruiting, and certainly a reliance on former EU workers. It's come up repeatedly the importance of engagement about stakeholder engagement. Is that harder for the small business sector, albeit even with representatives such as FSB and others doing great work? Is that a particular issue, and how do we get over that so that we hear their voice? If I could ask Professor Sims first. Thank you. In terms of the uncertainty, I think that there's a number of problems for us as researchers but also for businesses practically. One of those problems is that so much has been changing at the same time that it's very difficult to unpick the specific effects of Brexit above separate from the effects of lockdowns, the effects of Covid, etc. I can't give you a sensible, simple, snappy answer because the data, when you've got lots of things moving all at the same time, it's very difficult to isolate single effects within that, whether that's labour market data or supply chain data or sales data or whatever it is. Businesses, in practical terms, have faced both of those catastrophes in many respects for many businesses but also for some businesses opportunities at the same time. I think that it will make it very difficult, even going forward, even when we've got more rounded data, longer term data, etc., to really identify the effects of Brexit above the effects of any other big changes that were happening at the same time. Did they do enough to plan? I don't think that they had enough information to plan in many sectors. We didn't know how some of the details, and we still don't know in the longer term how some of the details of particular sectors, particular trading arrangement, particular products and particular labour market dynamics would change. I think that a lot of businesses did a lot of planning, but almost by definition, if you then throw in a level of detail that we didn't know prior to hitting Brexit and then you throw in coronavirus as well, it becomes an almost day-by-day scenario, and I really feel for organisations that have had to work through that. In terms of SMEs and engagements, I published a report last week with Spice about employer engagement with skills planning. I know that Spice has made that available last week, so I'm very happy to circulate the link. One of the issues that I identify is the issue of engaging SMEs and the very specific challenges of engaging SMEs. There are representative organisations, as you rightly point out. The challenge with those is their representative capacity and legitimacy. In other words, how do they have structures that engage large numbers of employers' SMEs in particular sectors? There are real challenges for them. Many of the representative organisations acknowledge that engaging SMEs is just harder, both in terms of skills. The people running SMEs might not know about these ways of engaging and forums for engaging, but they might not have the capacity—they're less likely to have the capacity and expertise to be able to do that. We need to think specifically about how we engage SMEs. It's almost certainly at sectoral level. That was a strong message coming out from the research that I've been doing over the past two years. I did challenge many organisations to think about whether sectoral level is the appropriate level, and there was a strong sense that it is. There is a job for the state, in its various forms, to support that and to support the organisations that collectively represent SMEs and employers in general, to work with them to make sure that they're not just representing the same old voices issues. There's an immensely complex terrain out there of employer representative organisations that are often overlapping. Sometimes they're saying similar things, sometimes they're saying contradictory things. I think that there is space for us to think through how we strengthen representative structures so that we're confident that we really are engaging employers and then able to cascade back to explain why apprenticeship policy looks like it does or whatever the policy is in the area of skills. That remains a challenge, and in the report I lay out a few ideas about where that might go, but I think that for all of us that is a huge challenge. That's great, thank you. That's very helpful, and perhaps Paul Hunter as well. Thank you. I think that it would echo a lot of what Professor Sims has said. There's so much uncertainty with regard to what was occurring up to the agreement at the tail end of last year, but I think that what we could have predicted was that there would be a labour shortage because of the exit of many workers of EU citizenship going back to their home countries, and the consequent difficulties between European workers back into the UK. We've seen that with the issues in the media over the past few months. There could have been better planning in terms of understanding that there would be gaps in certain skills in the market. That comes again to the points that I made before about close collaboration and having those close conversations to try to deal with those things, but I know that it's difficult. With the gas tech SMEs, I hold a lot of conversations with small business owners in the west of Scotland, and they tell me that it's difficult to attract employees because of the warfare talent that one organisation, for example, data analytics firm in Glasgow, struggles to attract young staff because he has to compete with larger organisations that work in the local area, and he can't pay as much as they can. Going back to Professor Sims's point about what role there might be for the state, that's a tricky one. Obviously, it might not be a good idea for the state to intervene too much here, but that comes down to small and medium-sized business owners having a stronger say and a stronger involvement with the gas to universities where they can plug into a pipeline. They also need to understand that it's not just necessarily about the money. Many applicants are keen on the salary, but they also want a career pathway, so it's educating small, medium-sized owner managers to explain to applicants that there is a potential career pathway for them in this organisation. We can offer you this salary, but we offer you these opportunities to grow in our business. That could be a means to attract and retain applicants coming from the higher education process when they graduate. I think that the state could perhaps advise small, medium-sized enterprise owner managers on how to better improve how they can explain the attractiveness of working with their organisations. The problem with SMEs, as well, is that a lot of them are focusing on surviving rather than thriving, particularly in the Covid pandemic. There has been a lot of stress and a lot of panic to keep a lot of businesses going. I think that there needs to be that role for the state. It's just helping small, medium-sized enterprise owners and managers to articulate a clearer career pathway, a more attractive career pathway for people coming in. There may be some subsidies for training and development, but the answer to trying to address SMEs' gaps, linking with more vocational training, could be an option as well. Can I ask both those who are asking questions and those who are responding to keep both questions and answers tight? I would like to ensure that all members have a full opportunity to ask their questions, and we just need to be a bit mindful of timing. Katie, I think that you wanted to come in briefly on this one. Yes, I will keep it brief. I wanted to just let the committee know that, in terms of the uncertainty that Brexit created for our members at OGUK, we are actually about to conduct a survey with our members on the impact of Brexit, and I would be happy to write to the committee once we've conducted that survey to share anything that comes out of it. We do have special forums focused towards SMEs, recognising the particular challenges that they face. Something that I wanted to just highlight to the committee, also linking to commitment that our industry has made around local content with the transition deal, and ensuring that we see opportunities realised right throughout the supply chain. I think that something that we will be looking at is what potential government support could help us towards achieving those local content targets, because one of the things that we have seen some of our larger member companies doing is choosing to centralise centres of excellence elsewhere, other than Scotland or the UK, in order to overcome the barriers that Brexit and Covid presented. I think that there's an opportunity for us to look at how we encourage companies to set up their centres of excellence in Scotland. Thank you for your offer to share that information, which we'll be very grateful for. Can I now move to Gordon MacDonald? Thanks very much, convener. I'm glad that we've started to talk about labour shortages. What I'm trying to understand, and I'll probably address this to Melanie Sims to start with, the ONS produced figures last month that showed that vacancies across the UK passed £1.1 million for the first time in history. The number of payroll employees hit a record of £29 million, which passed P-pandemic levels. Is the situation that we've got a problem with labour shortages or is it a skills gap? What can the Scottish Government for that matter do to address those issues? Exactly. It's a mismatch. The phrase that I was using in the answer to a previous question about a mismatch between the skills that the workers who are looking for jobs have and where the vacancies are. The vacancies at the moment are predominantly in sectors that were particularly affected by lockdowns—hospitality, retail a little bit still at picking up, but hospitality in particular. That's work that doesn't suit everybody for a whole set of reasons. If you think about bar work, cafe work or working in a hotel, it's generally relatively low paid, it's on highly flexible hours, it's often very short contracts that are then flexed to suit changes in demand. That kind of work doesn't suit everybody. We know that the biggest group that is struggling to find work at the moment are older workers who what they hope was temporarily left the labour market and are struggling to find work. That's a good example where there's a mismatch between the kinds of workers who are available and the jobs that are available. There's all sorts of complexity, for example, in hospitality about what's happened to student workers who often staff a lot of that kind of work as a job that they're not intending to stay in for very long but at the beginnings of their working lives and often doing other things, including education. We can explain a lot of the dynamics of that and I can go into it. I'm aware of the requirement to keep it short, but that's a good example of where we're talking about a mismatch, similarly with logistics. There's been a long-term problem with logistics, recruiting into logistics, which, in part because of the cost of training, goes to the point about risk that I was talking about where employee workers themselves are taking on the risk of subsidising their own training in order to access those jobs, not particularly attractive jobs in terms of hours and time away from home, that kind of thing. It takes time to train those workers into those kinds of jobs, so it's not something that you can just switch on as a supply of labour that you can just switch on. Those are the key reasons for those mismatches there. I forgot the second part of your question, which is also very interesting. I can't remember what it was, sorry. I was just trying to identify, with the labour shortages that we've got, what can the Scottish or the UK Government do to try and address it? I think that the key here is planning. Various people have spoken to this issue. We don't have very many mechanisms in the UK or in Scotland to plan for skills development. Brexit and coronavirus combined were a level of shock that, even if the best structured planning systems wouldn't have been able to predict that, but in countries where those planning systems exist—Paul Hunter spoke about the Netherlands, but we've also got examples from Sweden, Denmark, Germany and many other countries—you at least have a structure of stakeholders, employers, the state and workers that are usually represented through trade unions, coming together to be able to make plans. Even in a crisis, you see that those structures are able to at least sit down together and respond. We saw that in the great financial crisis. Countries that had those kinds of structures were quicker to respond to the changes to their labour market and economies that hit them in 2008-09. One of the biggest things that we can do in the UK, that is missing in the UK, exists in some forms in Scotland but isn't as structured as I would suggest that they need to be, is to provide those forums for planning around skills, labour market changes, et cetera—probably at sectoral level. The term that the European Union uses for that is social dialogue. It's a very particular word. We can use it or not, we can use it as suits. I tend to use it because it speaks to that process of the stakeholders sitting down and working out what the future looks like and what the response to the future and any shocks is. I would like to ask Paul Hunter the same question, but in doing so, looking at the number of vacancies by sector, it shows that since 2016 the number of vacancies has increased by 50 per cent. We are looking at supply chains and some of the sectors that are hit most by having efficient or inefficient supply chains is clearly transportation and storage, where we have already heard that the number of vacancies are between 76,000 and 100,000. Manufacturing vacancies have increased by 63 per cent and construction has increased since 2016 by 79 per cent. The CITB in Rytnevyn's terrorist committee said that it will require another 26,000 people by 2025. Paul, can you give us some indication about how we are trying to address that problem that is going to hit us in the next couple of years? The first point that I would make is establishing what are the pathways to become qualified in those roles and to place an attractiveness for those roles so that people leaving education will want to work in them or, alternatively, if someone wishes to upscale and move into that profession. It is a very difficult question to answer, but I think that there needs to be a clear promotion of those roles by more campaign or whatever, just so that people see that those jobs are available and that those jobs are accessible. There needs to be clear information about what training is required and what costs are involved. I think that what the state can do is to assist with costs of training. For example, if we are talking about transportation, the cost of an HGV, the HGV instruction can cost up to £2,500, which is a lot of money for many people. Can there be assistance for people who wish to become a lawyer driver, for example, to pay those costs? We know that shortfalls exist, vacancies exist, but many people do not. There needs to be a stronger campaign to promote those vacancies to the general public. I think that that will inspire more interests. I know that I will keep those answers tight, but I will go back to the previous answer that I gave about the Netherlands. The close association between employers, state and technical campuses help with that kind of training. If we talk about construction manufacturing, where there is a lot of shortage and labour shortage, there needs to be a closer collaboration. I hope that that addresses your quite difficult question to answer, but I hope that that was helpful. There is Katie Orr-Marc who wants to come in on that. My reflection would be linking to the work that we will be doing in terms of skills requirements for the future and looking at the work that we are doing to ensure transferability of skills across sectors is another of our areas of focus. I think that it will be vital to give people looking at roles in manufacturing and construction, the reassurance and the visibility that those roles are transferable across sectors in a way that helps them to see a long-term career in two industries vital to some of the key technologies that are going to help us on our roads to net zero. I look at the software sector, and it is worth bearing in mind that industrial terms software now is everywhere and Scotland has got to be an active player globally in software industries as we once were in steel. The steel of 100 years ago is now software. If I look at the supply issue or the vacancy issue there, the first thing to say is that any vacancy numbers underplay the issue in any of the sectors. Some are advertised, some are never even put out there because there's no point because people know they can't find the staff, so they don't try and they moderate their ambitions. I think that in the tech sector in Scotland that's absolutely the case, the start-ups in Glasgow and Edinburgh that know they can't compete with the larger companies and the salaries that they pay, so they just change the timescale, change their ambitions, etc. There's a kind of iceberg effect here where, under the waterline, a huge amount of industrial opportunity and high-paying jobs for people are lost and are not visible in these statistics. On how we address the issue for the software or tech sector, there are three ways we can do that. The first is that we need to improve the process by which we educate our children in computing science and related subjects. We don't do a good job of that right now, although the subject worldwide in industrial terms is growing massively. Although pre-pandemic, the number of software engineers in Scotland is growing by 150 per annum, so we are a very high growth sector that we want to be there. Despite that, the number of children taking computing science, which is the entry gateway to the industry, was dropping every year since about 2008. The number of teachers of the subject has dropped by about 23 per cent over the last 15 years. Scotland is going in the wrong direction and we have to arrest that in concrete ways. The second thing that we can do is to create a parallel access path for people who want to retrain into the sector. We have small initiatives running there, or larger-scale, but not effective initiatives, so our college system doesn't do well in this space. We have organisations that are able to take people who are changing from other industries and make them software engineers. It does very well, but it is not operating at scale and so on. There is lots of things to do there. The third piece, not just in this area but in every area, is that we have to find a way to get people coming from other countries into Scotland. Regardless of the Brexit effect, we have to do that because the numbers that were quoted earlier—I think that we all know that we are not going to meet those numbers in Scotland. We are going to have to import talent whatever else we do. I don't know how we are going to do that, but that has to be one of the questions that we are asking. I move straight on to Maggie Chapman. Thanks, convener. Good morning to the panel. Thank you for joining us this morning. I have a couple of questions. One is about automation and the links to labour and logistics, and then one is about the skills and planning of collaboration. On automation, there has been a lot of chat around the risks and opportunities of automation, not only for labour markets but for supply chains as well. From each of your perspectives, could you say a little bit about how ready you think we are and what it is that we need to be doing? We have heard some discussion about planning and that we need to plan, but what does that planning actually look like? I think that there is also a lot of talk about planning, but we do not actually know what that means. Melanie, if I can ask you first. Sure. Thank you very much. The important thing about automation is that it is tasks that are automated, usually, rather than jobs. Jobs are a function of employers' decisions about how to package together particular sets of tasks into a job that an individual could do and then advertise that job and match it to the skills available in the labour market. There are relatively few jobs that are being completely automated. There are a few, but that is not the predominant story across most labour markets in Europe in general. What is much more common is that tasks are being automated and that is changing the profile of jobs available, but there are choices in that. One of the things that I am always keen to emphasise is the extent to which we, as employers, but also as workers and certainly as the state and the various arms of the state, have choices that can shape the decisions that are made. For example, the cost of labour is a really key part of decisions about whether or not an employer chooses to implement a particular piece of software or machinery or whatever it is, but it then automates various tasks. The classic example that I use is that there are little tags available that you can put onto the market shelves that automatically change the price—the price of an individual product changes. In the UK, we do not see those very much because the cost of labour is relatively cheap. In countries that have a much higher cost of labour, those are routinely used because that is a job that does not make sense to put a person in that kind of cost. That does not mean that there is necessarily a lower demand for labour in those supermarkets. It just means that the workers in those supermarkets are doing different things than they are doing in UK supermarkets. I think that those choices are really important. It is also important that we do not see that as a one-way only track. If we think about car washes in my lifetime, car washes have de-automated, so we used to have no hand car washes at all. That was not a feature of my childhood and young adulthood. Now, hand car washes are ubiquitous. It is quite difficult to find an automated car wash. There are various reasons for that. Low labour standards and exploitation of particular forms of labour in that sector are a big part of that story. Automation proves the argument that there are choices and that they are not linear. People, employers and workers within those jobs and sectors are making decisions based on the incentives and disincentives of what is happening. What do we need to do? We need to get down to the sectoral level, the occupational level, the people who actually know what is happening in their workplace. We need to engage them to find out how that affects them and what their decisions are. What does that look like? That speaks to the second part of the question. Typically, what it looks like when it is working well is a set of forums, usually at the sectoral level, where employers collectively can argue and say what they need, what is changing, how automation is playing out or how Brexit is playing out or whatever it is, in conjunction with the voice of labour, which is typically trade unions. The reason that those voices are important is because unions tend to put pressure on organisations, companies and managers to question the decision making. It means that it is not only the interests of employers who are deciding what the effects of automation are. There is a countervailing voice that is asking questions about why does it look like that, what are the consequences of that, who wins, who loses, what are the rewards, if somebody re-skills, what does that mean for their pay, et cetera. The state pays for a lot of training, both in the form of education but also in skills training. It usually involves the state in some form, whether that is through colleges or through an organisation like SDS or whatever it is. It varies from country to country, essentially depending on how they structure their training system, but the state usually has a voice because the state is usually the one that sets standards but also has some financial interest in this process. Usually, there is a planning cycle yearly typically but not always, so there are usually five-year plans, ten-year plans, what does our sector look like, what are the upcoming technological automation innovations, et cetera, and what are we going to do about that and what does that mean for the skills both in attracting new people at entry level, attracting new people perhaps from re-skilling or from overseas and for developing the people that we've got. This is routine in many countries. Okay, thanks very much for that. There's a lot in that. Katie, can I come to you for your perspective? Yes, it's a great question. Automation, and you asked particularly around logistics, but automation presents a huge opportunity for the oil and gas industry, both in terms of how our operations run now and also in terms of how we take those learnings forward. It creates, unlocks huge efficiencies for how we run our operations and also unlocks opportunities to improve safety. This year, we published a report that was done in collaboration with across industry the impact of data and digitalisation that includes automation within that to shine a light on where we see opportunity to ensure that the workforce have the skills that they need, that they're getting the training that they need to embrace the opportunity that automation creates but also in terms of solutions to overcome challenges that the workforce may be facing in the future. I should also add that through our industry working groups, we'll be looking to bring companies together to look at how we might be able to deliver those solutions to less planning and more doing. I wonder if I can shift on to my next question about collaboration. We've heard a little bit about the importance of that and that we're not doing that effectively. Have we missed a trick with the city region deals that we've got around the interaction between industry, academia and local government and Scottish Government as well? What is it that we, either you, from your industry or academic perspectives or us as the Scottish Parliament, can be doing to ensure that we get that effect of collaboration? I'll go to Mark Logan first. If I may just make one comment on your previous question. My view is that automation does take jobs away and creates new jobs and they're not in the same place and that's the problem. Otherwise we'd all still be working in farms. Most people worked in farms about 100 years ago and now most of us don't. That's automation. The modern age is the same thing happens even if my industry, which is seen as heavily automated and high tech in a safe haven, which isn't going to suffer from those effects. In Sky Scanner we automated all of our testing and there's no need for the testers anymore. Some of them had to find other jobs, some of them were skilled. Automation is inevitable because if we're not doing it, someone else is doing it somewhere else and therefore we're not competitive anymore and it is going to destroy jobs in my view and create new jobs. The bridge between that is that we've got to have a far more flexible education system. We've got to have some concept of a lifelong learning passport and build an infrastructure around that, largely on line, I suspect, that allows people to make those transitions. The other one just got to be honest about that point. That's the brutality of it. To your question, are we being collaborative enough? I think that what we are being is too slow on everything in Scotland. I'm working on implementing my report for government last year and what I find is that when things move across agency boundaries or government sub-department boundaries, everything slows down by a factor of about 100. I think that we're very good in Scotland at slowly talking about stuff and not doing very much. I think that what we need to do is learn how to iterate at a higher frequency. We do seek out views and we do get the right people together but the world is starting to change faster than it used to and that rate of change is increasing. If you imagine that we've all seen back to the future, that movie set in 1985, Marty goes back 30 years, what's different? They don't have diet Pepsi. That's the difference. If we filmed that movie in 2015 and go back 30 years, there's no mobile phones, there's no internet, there's no artificial intelligence, et cetera, et cetera. Things are increasing and what we need to do as a government and agencies is to iterate more quickly in our discussions and try to get more action-orientated at a faster rate. I think that that should almost be a metric for how quickly we get to decisions on what we're going to do. If we make the wrong decisions provided that we're iterating quickly enough, it doesn't matter if we can fix that but I think that we do an awful lot of discussion in Scotland. That's how I would approach your question. I wonder if you want to come in on either of those questions. Let me give you three specific examples of where opportunities can be developed here. I've been communicating with some robotics firms in the Boston area, the Boston Massachusetts area, and one firm in particular, Viking Robotics. They work closely with the challenges that are with regard to what kind of equipment they need, what staff they need and what training they need, and perhaps that links with Mark's point before about attracting organisations like Vecna into Scotland. I think that the second point that I would make is with the Galaxy United States against BMW North Carolina in Spartanburg. They work closely with their technical college to train up people who can work in the organisation alongside the automated equipment, so there's that socio-technical interface. The employees are trained specifically to work with automated facilities and they do that very well. The third example is ALDI in the UK. They've been using a lot of automation recently and that's created smaller, more capable teams within their supermarkets. That's enabled what we call a high performance work system, albeit that there's a lot of stress on the system, but it's created multi-skilled workers who can do various tasks at various times and they can work more seamlessly with the equipment and the automated facilities. I think that it's working more closely with organisations overseas, learning from them what they do and speaking to organisations within the UK to understand what the challenges and opportunities are. Again, you can plan more effectively about what skills are required for particular jobs. I don't think that I've got time to give anybody else the opportunity to come in, so I'll hand back. Thank you, Maggie. As always, my plea is to stay concise. Thank you very much, convener, and good morning to the panel. That's an issue that's obviously been partly touched on with some of the comments so far. Katie mentioned the phrase, a managed transition. Others refer to a just transition, not just an obvious sector such as oil and gas, but across all sectors in that journey to net zero. Can I ask the panel what are the key skills that Scotland needs to equip people to deliver a genuine just transition and how does the pipeline for those skills currently look? I want to put that question to all the panel. I suppose that we'll start with yourself, Katie, for the obvious sector, but I do want to hear the comments of all the panel on that. I will try to keep it brief. We are working to understand what skills are required in order for us to help the country to meet its net zero ambition. What's clear is that the skills that we have in the oil and gas industry today will be vital to delivering our ambition to ensure that we stay on track with meeting our emissions reduction targets and that we remain on track to achieve our target of reducing emissions by 50 per cent by 2030. What's absolutely vital is, as you say, that we have that managed transition and that we correct the misperception that this can just be a flick of a switch, because that will lead to job losses, seeing jobs going overseas, and seeing us offshoring our emissions. I think that that continued reinforcement of the Government's support for the vital skills that the people of the oil and gas industry have now in terms of delivering energy security and in meeting both our own industry and the country's net zero ambitions around reducing emissions from other industries. I'll just go round the rest of the panel in order to have them in front of me. Paul, do you have any comments? Can I just clarify the question, please? Yeah, there's been much discussion about a just transition as part of the journey towards net zero, so it's really just to ask what do you see as the key skills Scotland needs to equip people to deliver a genuine just transition and how does the pipeline for these skills currently look? That's it, but what do you mean by a just transition, I think? Well, effectively, there's been much debate about the oil and gas sector as the obvious sector that we know there's going to be inevitable job losses in that sector, so if we are to ensure that our workforce is a skill to take on alternative employment, and we call it a just transition, there's lots of phrases, what are the skills needed to make sure that people are equipped for that, that those alternative jobs, those jobs effectively, green jobs, if you like? Obviously, the technical skills. I'll answer that quickly and I'll make two points. The first point is the technical skills. One example is the maintenance of electric vehicles. You have a large body of mechanics working in Scotland who know how to service a vehicle with an internal combustion engine. They do not know how to maintain a vehicle with a battery that can kill you technically if you're trying to interfere with it. That's an example of the skills that people need in a particular area so that they can then transition over. We're ensuring that those people don't lose their jobs in servicing internal combustion vehicles over the next five to 10 years, but they can then gain the skills to service an electric vehicle. It's pinpointing the particular skills required in industries associated with sustainability and ensuring that those skills are met. There is that communication and collaboration with those organisations and industries. The second point that I would make is about soft skills. Again, this is an example from Sweden, where they link what's called inner development goals with the United Nations inability development goals. The focus is quite similar to our meta skills, but the focus is on resilience, on critical thinking and collaboration. Those are soft skills that need to be developed from a young age so that when young people or anyone who is leaving higher education or other education to have that mindset, it enables them to solve problems and come up with new ideas about how to create work and how to undertake work in sustainable practice. Thank you very much. Can I put the same point to Melanie? Thank you. I'll make a very quick point. As we make this transition, we need to make sure that we don't make the same mistakes that we made when we moved away from the industrialisation of mass manufacturing in the 1980s. We need to make sure that the jobs that replace those jobs in oil and gas, logistics and so on are good jobs. Paul's point about the sustainable development goals is really important in seeing the SDGs as fundamentally interrelated. We can't have the just transition if the trade-off is bad jobs. We can't have that transition if the trade-off is greater gender inequality in the labour market, et cetera. We need to see those SDGs as fundamentally interrelated and work to make sure that the jobs that replace those good jobs, because the vast majority of them are good jobs with equally good jobs. That's the moon on the stick. That's what we ideally should be aiming for. The clock is ticking. We know that there will be inevitable job losses in many sectors as part of the journey to net zero. What you're saying is that we still don't know what those jobs will be that could replace them or good jobs will be that will replace them. Never mind the skills that are needed. Indeed. I think that we're not as clear as—just because of the uncertainties around how the labour market and economy will develop and change in the next 10 years, but we can do a lot of work, A, to shape that. That speaks to my point about the choices that we have ahead. We can do a lot to shape those, to set an environment in which good foreign direct investment wants to locate itself in Scotland. We can make choices or we can make choices to have a very deregulated labour market that puts downward pressure on wages and terms and conditions and take the consequences of that. As far as I'm concerned, that's the least good option. I would certainly agree with that point. Finally, to Mark, could I have your comments on the point, Mark? Certainly. I think that we've first of all got to decide what we mean by a just transition. Who is it just to? Is it just to our grandchildren, for example? Every country has a good reason why we should prolong our current fossil fuel business model, and it's usually couched in more or less the terms that we're using here. However, as we've seen from COP right now—and it seems extraordinary that we have to say this—our current commitments will result in catastrophic loss of life on a massive scale on this planet before the end of the century. I think that we've got to be careful about what we mean by just transition. I think that what's missing in all this is an enormous sense of urgency. Scotland can be a green demonstrator economy to the world. If you look at what Scotland exports in terms of capability in the oil sector today, it's all the operating capability, the expertise, maintenance, troubleshooting, analysis, et cetera. We have built an industry that exports to the world a huge amount of expertise in operating the fossil fuel industry's artefacts. I don't know why we can't map those skills to the same things that we need to do in the world we're moving to in terms of solar, wind and battery storage, green hydrogen, hydrolysis and fusion medium, which will come along in our lifetimes. As Melanie-Anne talked about the uncertainty in those skills, I think that that's the point. If you want to be a leader, then things are uncertain. If you want to come in and fill those jobs when everything's clear, then you end up filling them and importing that skill set from companies that got there first. Exhibit A is wind power, where we buy that from first the Danes and the Germans and now the Chinese, but we should have been one of the first, but we weren't because it wasn't quite certain. My proposal is that while it's uncertain, we map out what we think the future in Scotland looks like in a country that goes net zero a lot faster than the timescales we're talking about and then starts having concrete plans about how we'd map and support our people transitioning into those uncertain areas, how we'd help them with our companies or retrain or expand massively what Scottish power is doing or wherever it might be, but we need to stop talking about a just transition as a dog whistle for continuing a business model that's going to kill our grandchildren because that's what the science is telling us. That's not an extreme statement, the science is telling us that with every country's excuses, coding Scotland's, that we're going to have an uninhabitable planet by the end of the century. I do think that that has to enter into this just transition discussion. So what's stopping that mapping process taking, notwithstanding we understand there are uncertainties about the jobs of the future, but what's stopping that mapping process taking place now? Well, I think that there's a lack of a sense of urgency. I think that we believe that things are going to continue pretty much as they have and make it a bit worse, get a bit hotter, a few bad days, but actually what we're in the middle of now is an exponential change in our climate, and we're in the flat part of the exponential, but what we're hearing, and you saw the reports as recently gestured, is that the current commitments from COP are, this is a silly reason we haven't met them, which no one thinks we're going to, with the result of catastrophic warming. So I don't understand why we don't worldwide, including in this country, have a sense of huge urgency to safeguard our children's children's existence, and I think that if we brought that into the today, we'd be talking a lot more intensively about ending the massive subsidies that we give to the industry in the UK. Ten times more money is spent on that than on stimulating the green industry. It seems extraordinary, but there we are, worldwide, £5.9 trillion in fossil fuel subsidies a year. So I think that we've got to bring forward that catastrophic future to now and say, as we did with Covid, we're in a crisis, how do we respond? I think that we would find ways to transition in a way that does not destroy the livelihoods of our people, which I think we're all very conscious of. I grew up in Clydebank, I know what that means, to see heavy industry move away, first hand, I know what that means. But at the same time, we've got to be very, very careful that we're not just taking our heads in the sand and using just transition to mean prolong the fossil fuel industry business model, which I fear to a large extent in this country, we still are doing. I'm conscious of time, so I'll put my final question just to Katie, given the sector I refer to, although I appreciate it. There's a wider issue here, but Parliament recently held a debate on the need for an offshore training passport, which highlighted that there were barriers to the recognition of training in qualifications across employers in the offshore oil and gas industry. Are there any other barriers like this that might limit the ability of workers to access upskilling and reskilling opportunities? That's a good question. We support a training passport to ensure that it is as easy as possible for workers to easily move from one sector to another. I've just had a complete memory blank. I thought that it was unfair to throw the question in at the end of talking about a subject where there is a solution, I suppose, to try to break down some of those barriers. I don't know if any other member of the panel wants to come in on what barriers people have got to accessing upskilling and reskilling opportunities. I wonder if I could just talk for one minute to make clear the work that is on going to map those skills requirements. A recent report by Robert Gordon University has shown that 90 per cent of skills in the oil and gas industry are transferable. Our industry is changing, and I would be happy to write to the committee with more detail on that. That would be very helpful. Thank you for that, Katie. I don't know if I'm all at a time, convener, or— I think that time is going to be a bit tight, Colin. Okay, thanks for that. But Katie, we will obviously take you up on your offer to supply us with that information again. Can we move now to Paul Sweeney? Thanks, convener. I think that it has been an interesting discussion so far. Certainly, digital and leadership skills have been highlighted as a key gap in Scotland for several years. What would you consider have been the key barriers to reducing skills gaps in those areas? I would like to come to Mark first with that question. Thank you, Paul. In digital, I would start with making computing science a tier 1 subject in our schools. It is currently in practice a tier 3 subject, which I think is that important to our future. There is almost no industries now, which is not rich in software tools and technologies. Can we want to build them or buy them? I think that we have to start back at the supply chain. If we do not have the software engineers and related skill sets to populate our startups and our larger businesses, then everything else is new. I would start there. At the moment, we are doing a really bad job there. We are doing a really bad job. About 17 per cent of our schools do not teach computing science at all. Imagine that that is mathematics or physics. The subject is taught in other schools in many cases by non-specialists, by the business studies teacher or my own children's schools case and ex-home economics teacher who are doing their best but are not trained in the subject. We are trying to train our children in how to programme computers. The people who are training them in many cases do not know how to programme computers. We have to address that issue. It is made worse by the fact that, unlike mathematics or physics or chemistry, on the sciences, computing science changes regularly. A teacher graduating in computing science 12 years ago would not have experienced app development, for example. We have to regularly upskill our teachers as well. When we get further up the educational pipeline, we get to the university level, we get to the subject of leadership. We need people who can start companies, who can join companies and lead them. I think that the challenge in speeches from not having the technical skills to not having the entrepreneurial and business skills, is that, universally, computing science graduates, for example, are very strong technically but really very weak on everything else—how to grow a market, how to manage a team, how to do any of those things. They are not particularly encouraged uniformly in our universities to develop those skills. Some are very good. Strath Clyde stands out as a very good example of that. Others are not. We have to raise the entrepreneurial chops of our technical graduates, not just in computing science everywhere, because, if you look at some of the biggest companies on earth, we started at the university of Google, for example Facebook and Microsoft, to name a few. It is important that we make improvements there. Beyond that, we need to educate our founders of companies and their founding teams in world-class best practice. For example, if I spend time in the Silicon Valley, which I used to do a lot of, any founder that I spoke to had a deep knowledge of how to grow a tech company. If I do the same in Scotland, I tend not to have those skills. We can fix that with education at founder level. Really what I am proposing, if you stand back from it, is looking at the pipeline from school through to university to starting a company or joining a company and strengthening that pipeline in concrete ways, which is something that we are trying to do as part of the implementation of the technology ecosystem review. I also think that we need to do the same on parallel access paths, which is adults moving into the industry. I think that there is a task to scale best practice. We have some best practice, but it is not scaled. I also think that we need a talent attraction if those are of some sort in some way. That is a really helpful point. Just to supplement that, I wanted to ask if you could give us some reflections on the experience of Skyscan or as a Scottish unicorn company in the sector, but obviously one that is now under foreign ownership. Is that ecosystem in Scotland an example of how maybe we need to do more to try and build Scottish companies that remain under Scottish ownership and that could actually create that ecosystem? I think that the ecosystem is a funnel. At one end of the funnel, the short end of the funnel, you have lots of very small start-ups, very small one-and-two-person start-ups. As you move through the funnel, that rate narrows. Not all of them grow to scale and not all the scale companies grow to unicorn status and not all the unicorn statuses grow to digger than that. To the funnel narrows, but right now in Scotland, the funnel narrows too quickly. Not all the companies that should have got to scale get to scale because of a lack of funding or a lack of the management progress or something like that. It is quite a nuanced question. What we are doing in the ecosystem implementation that I refer to is that we have identified a number of interventions that are more than 30 to widen that funnel. We should be careful—I will not talk through all those in the time that I refer to those and supply the paper if needed. We should be careful that we do not discourage founders from selling their companies because being a founder and a tech company is hell. I have done it a few times and it is extremely challenging and difficult. One of the benefits of selling your companies is that you get some reward for that. It is actually quite healthy and natural to see companies sell and companies IPO and all that stuff at different stages. I would say that what we lack in Scotland right now is a critical mass of management expertise so that sometimes companies sell because they just do not know how to get to the next stage. If we could more experience executive talent in this area, we could take those companies a bit further. To be honest, that is one of our considerations. Did we know how to keep scaling that? That needs the ability to attract talent to Scotland, which we cannot do just now because it takes ecosystems too small, so it is too big a risk to come. We have to scale the ecosystem when the talent will come. That is the subject of our interventions. There is a tipping point beyond which the ecosystem grows by itself, and our job is to get us to that tipping point, and that is what we are working to try to do right now. That is really helpful. The other question that I have is about the future skills action plan. Obviously, aiming to increase the flexibility of the skills system and the focus is on a meter skills approach, which will better equip individuals to navigate a labour market that is more fluid than ever. That is a lot of jargon there, but are there clear examples of countries that are getting that right? Is there a benchmarking opportunity that the Scottish Government and the Scottish industry more generally could learn from? Maybe bring Melanie in on that, if you have an insight. If anyone else does want to come in on that, please let me know. In the report that I spoke about that I was published by Spice last week, they were asking exactly that question. There were two countries that we identified as being particularly helpful. One was Denmark, where, similar to the Netherlands that Paul spoke about, there are structured committees and integration of vocational training into discussions with collective representation from employers, the state and workers through their unions. That is a really interesting reference point, both in the Netherlands and Denmark. There are slightly different approaches but very similar learning points. The other case that we identified was Singapore. Singapore is very interesting. Singapore has a much more active state involvement, probably not surprisingly given the politics of Singapore, but what was really interesting was how well-developed their structures of social partnership, as they call them, are. They have about nine national-level committees that look at a whole range of issues, labour market issues, one of which is skills and future skills. There is a commitment to collective decision-making about shaping policy in that area. Although that is a very different economic setting and a political setting, there are interesting lessons about how structured that can be while still providing the flexibility that employers always emphasise that they want. My background is in comparative employment relations, and I can pick all sorts of examples. We picked those two because they are both small countries with a serious commitment and engagement in that area. One of the points that I was just going to come in on, which relates to your question but also to previous questions and previous points that were being made, is that when we talk about skills planning, it is really important that we do not only focus on entry into the labour market, so that education into work transition. That is very important, but post-employment skills development is also super important. I think that we have emphasised that at different points, but I think that sometimes there is a tendency to talk about what skills people need at the point at which they get their first job. That is part of the question, but it is by no means the only question. In the UK, in Scotland as well, we are terrible at investing in training once people are employed. That really is a question about engaging employers and removing some of the disincentives for employers to train in this very flexible labour market. There is a different set of questions when we ask about post-employment training and skills development than when we talk about entry into labour markets. That is really helpful. Paul, would you like to comment on that as well? Yes, thanks Paul. Just to quickly echo Mark's points about the excellent point, we are not focusing on that enough. The second point is building on Mark's point about home economics teacher teaching IT. That demonstrates the skills gaps in education that those need to be addressed urgently. The Netherlands is an excellent example of collaboration across various industries and various stakeholders. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Good morning, everybody. It is nice to be joining you, albeit remotely. I have only got a couple of short questions, because I know that we have been covering a lot today. First of all, to Mark Logan, I am very interested in your comments about the pace of change, about creativity for entrepreneurs and so on. My question is, what can be done to utilise the creatives? I say that as someone who initially did a music degree and quickly came to understand and describe it as precision engineering because of the accuracy that is required to produce certain types of music and then subsequently did a postgraduate qualification in IT. I was told both at the time and then a company I eventually went to work for, but in both cases I had been recruited because of evidence of creativity and they wanted that in their IT department. It seems to me that whether it is business, whether it is government at whatever level, there is not necessarily the understanding of how creative the creatives are and how useful they can be in IT. What can be done to utilise the creatives to Mark Logan? That is a fantastic point, Michelle. I completely agree with your sentiment. If you look at the great Renaissance cities in our past, where they were just incredibly productive, incredibly creative and incredibly inventive, you could even level that description that Glasgow and Edinburgh back in the day. What you tend to find particularly in Leonardo da Vinci stepping out into the market square in Naples or Florence, for example. First of all, those people were not bounded by over-specialisation, so Leonardo wasn't a painter or a mathematician or an anatomist or any of those things he bought in this and so on. He was all of them. Secondly, when he stepped into that market square, he was literally talking and meeting with people who were just the same. There was a far less concentration or focus on specialising in some subset of a subset of a thing, which is what we now do in our education system, and much more about having depth but also breadth and mixing with people with complementary different skills. That is how you create Renaissance. What we should be trying to do in our education system but also in our industrial world, business or beyond, is to recreate those conditions. To give you an example, at university we teach the science students in the science school, the business students in the business school and the design students in the design school. We do our very best to keep them as far apart as possible. I think that if we taught them to really collide or to do joint projects across faculty, across school projects, they would have their eyes opened to the enormous power of combining different talents in schools or different disciplines together. I think that we need to be looking at how we operate as a society in educational terms upwards and mixing those skillsets. For example, Sky Scanner was a super technical company, but we were only successful because we had periods of creativity. That is the only time that we were successful—we did something different. Creative skills—we tend to talk about the creative industries if they are separate from the IT industry—we need to stop doing that. I think that that is about colliding those skillsets and recreating those market squares. I am completely with you on that sentiment. I know that music is just mathematics that is put to a tune, isn't it? I think that what we often do is technical. Everything is technical, really. It is just the tags that we wear. Let us shed the tags, shed the sense of over-specialisation and start mixing people. I think that we will get real creativity and we will actually get real industrial output from that, too. I strongly agree with you, but I see that Paul Hunter, I suspect, wants to come in at this point as well. Thank you. I would disagree slightly with Mark's comment in which, in universities, we do not have that collaboration. We do have that collaboration. I will give you a specific example. We have a professional pathways programme here in the business school. We collaborate with Glasgow School of Art, the School of Medicine, Vet, Relief Sciences and the School of Engineering, to name just three. We create those market squares. The students, for example, from Glasgow School of Art come in with great ideas about design. We teach them how to start up a business, how to create a human resource management function and all that. It is great to hear those ideas but also to teach them how they can use those ideas to transfer to a business. For example, a student had an idea about how to use a sculpting. How could she transfer those skills to create a business? I believe that she is going on to design business, so she is transferring those technical skills that she has, but she now has the knowledge about how to start up a business. Going back to Mark's points, a lot of founders in Glasgow and Scotland do not necessarily know how to build up a business. With the professional pathways programme, we are hoping that the students now have some knowledge about how they can start up a successful enterprise. We see a lot of market squares and dialogue sessions with 300 students. We have engineers talking to sculptors talking to vets talking to musicians. We see all of that and it is absolutely fantastic. We need more of that at universities across Scotland. I do not disagree with what you are saying. I suppose that the point that I was trying to make was that there is nothing stopping somebody who has done a music degree who often will be producing their own music literally, witching tack and going and doing something different. I know that because I did that to myself. It was 30 years ago, so it was even less common arguably than it is now. I can see that Mark wants to pop back in before I go on to my last and final question. Mark, do you want to pick up on this thread? Sure, just very briefly. It is great to hear Paul describe that mechanism. As you said, I think that we need to do more of that. I see good practice like that in a lot of universities, but it is not intensive enough once a term in some cases. It is not in the case that you describe Paul, but that needs to become a lot more. The point that you made Michelle about actually literally retraining after you have developed one skill set in the creative space and you want to apply that to the tech world, I think that it is incredibly important that we scale our ability for people to make the transition that you made. We have, for example, Code Clan in Scotland, which takes people on average at about 30, who want to retrain into the tech industry. They come out as excellent people for businesses to hire because they have got life experience, they have got different domain knowledge than young graduates have. The problem is that it is not sufficiently scaled, so we need to establish that as a major talent pathway. I completely agree. My second and last question is for Paul and Professor Sims. It is a slightly cheeky one, but it strikes me that in terms of the supply chains element, we do not have that many people who understand supply chains. Even so-called supply chain directors may really just be logistics specialist or procurement specialist. I am saying this as a perception. I do not know if Professor Sims or Paul You have a view on that. When we are talking about supply chains, do we fundamentally have too few people who understand what they are given our background being in Europe and so on? Either Melanie or Paul on that one, thanks. Thank you. I am going to use this as an opportunity to plug something that we are doing within my school, which is setting up a specialist degree programme with exactly that focus, supply chains and digitalisation, which is exactly intended to fill that gap. We have just recruited a professor who is an expert in recognising that this is an area where not only is our provision of specialist master's programmes needs development and filling in, but also more generally we need to be producing the kind of graduates who really do understand these kinds of issues. Obviously it takes a bit of time, and there are similar programmes around the UK and certainly around the world, but not as many as you would imagine. Obviously we have done a lot of comparison against competitor institutions and we are convinced that there is a gap in this area, which speaks to your question. Yes, there probably is a gap. We think there is a gap. We are doing our bit to fill it in, so hopefully we will have a new stream of graduates who really do understand. One of the things that happens when institutions hire leading professors from around the world, as we have done in this case, is that that often acts as an attraction for other researchers and other educators in this particular field, and we are certainly hoping that that is an area. I cannot speak for my other higher education institutions around Scotland. Thank you for that. A final word, Paul. Do you have anything to add to that? I think that what I would add is that supply chains are complex, and like Malcolm Park has said, supply chains will have technology firmly embedded with them. If we are educating people about supply chains, there needs to be that focus on computing as well. Supply chains are vital. That is a subject that could be talked about in primary, secondary, and skills alongside IT. Again, it is such a vital element, linked with the sustainability development goals of the UN's SDGs. Supply chains are key to those as well. Teaching the SDGs to young children at school is vital, linking with the impact on supply chains and creating these. That is a really good point. Thank you, convener, and that is me. Thank you, Michelle. Can I go across now to John Mason? Thank you very much, convener. We have covered a lot of areas already. I want to pick up on the area of older workers and younger workers. We have had a few comments in that area. Professor Sims talked about older workers struggling to find work. Paul Hunter talked about soft skills, critical thinking, which I imagine quite a lot of older people would have, but agility, which we might think of as being younger people. Also, some of the input that we have had from other organisations, HIE talked about competition for young people and UK hospitality talked about Scotland just not having enough workers. Should we, the public sector Government, be doing more to help older workers? Have we had too much emphasis on younger workers in the past? I think that it is really important that we do not frame this conversation as pitching generations against each other. Sometimes I am not suggesting that you have done that, but sometimes that can be where this conversation goes. We know that the challenges that face both groups are slightly different. We know that for younger workers, if they have extended periods out of the labour market, that has a lifelong scarring effect on them. That has a lifelong negative effect on many measures of life outcome, including health, housing and all sorts of things. It is really important that we focus on the challenges of helping young workers to make good and solid transitions into work. In this cycle of low pay, followed by periods of unemployment, low pay jobs and so on, we know that that cycle is problematic as well. The issues affecting young workers are very challenging. With older workers, we know that they are slightly different dynamics. We know that it is about them being able to communicate the skills that they have, but they are also supported to develop skills that employers are looking for in the recruitment process. They are not only able to explain what skills they have, but to develop new skills if the jobs that they had previously been doing are no longer there or no longer suitable for them. Those are two slightly different challenges, but neither of them are insurmountable. They are extremely important. Older workers leaving the labour market too early, earlier than they would have wanted to do, are also a major challenge for policy makers. We know quite a lot about what works in those kinds of spaces, broadly under the heading of active labour market policies, which support workers to develop their skills and not have to bear the burden of the cost of skilling and reskilling and all those kinds of things. I also think that there is work to do with employers. I am aware that I keep talking about employers, and I do not want that to be interpreted as beating up employers. Lots of employers are doing really good jobs at being committed to diversity both in older workers and younger workers in their recruitment and development, etc. There are some questions about how we make sure that employers and the state really share the costs and the risks of dealing with those two very practical sets of challenges to support those different groups of workers with their specific needs. Sometimes the state forgets. I see a lot of policy makers focused on what we can do to make workers more employable, which is an important part of the process, but forget the demand side of the labour market of working with employers to think through who you are targeting and why you are targeting those groups of workers. Can you do that differently? How do your structures support or discriminate against particular groups, not just older and younger workers, but all sorts of groups? It is important that we do not just see it as an issue of making workers more employable, but that we tackle the problem in the round. That was helpful. I will stick with you for a minute. The state has supported more training for younger people and less for older people. I had a small firm in my constituency who takes two apprentices every year and deliberately takes one younger and one older because they see the advantage in both, but I think that they get more support for the younger apprentice. Tied to that, we were talking about earlier post-employment skills development, and you said that it was terrible and that we should remove disincentives. What do you mean by removing disincentives? We have data about how many workers in any one year receive in-work training, and it is less than a quarter of workers for most of the most years. Sometimes it goes up to about a third, but we are hovering around that across the UK. I think that that data is valid. It is similar in Scotland as well. Most workers in any one year are not receiving any in-work training, and that puts us in stark contrast to many of our competitor countries. That is, if you like, the evidence, underpinning the comment that it is terrible. What can we do to remove disincentives? One of the biggest disincentives for a lot of employers is the risk that if you train staff, they will be poached by competitor employers, and they will not stay with your organisation. There are all sorts of things that we can do. That is where the idea of working at a sectoral level or, at least, at an occupational level becomes really important. If you can encourage training at sectoral level or occupational level, it removes the risk that your competitor employer will come along and deal with your trained workers at whatever stage of their career. That is where the idea of planning becomes important. It was originally the idea of the apprenticeship levy. The way that the apprenticeship levy has been introduced and has moved away from its original intentions means that it is in practice not doing that. That is a separate story. That was the idea. You get all larger employers to invest in apprenticeships, into some sort of training, and it removes the disincentives for the ones that are prepared to invest, because everyone is paying a levy, and then you can either take advantage of it or not. If you do not take advantage of it, you are still paying into the system. Thank you very much. Maybe I could switch to Katie Haydenrich and ask, because you are a specific sector, what is your experience, I am imagining, when you keep training your workers even when they are older? Is that what you do? Are you afraid of losing them or is that part of the industry? We are a highly regulated industry. Obviously, we pay due attention to the continued training of the workforce to ensure that it has the appropriate skills and competence. I think that what comes to mind is the work that we are doing around improving our diversity and inclusivity, and I think that that will see us ensuring that we see improvement in underrepresented parts of our workforce. I think that that would bring in perhaps the age range and ensuring that we do not lose the vital experience and expertise that the more mature members of the workforce bring. Mark Logan, your digital side is seen as being for young people. Are there enough older people? Are older people looking at it? Should they be looking at it more? Should they be getting more training? I think that there is a prejudice in the tech sector that because in any generation the technologies are new and recent that only new and recent humans can operate and build them. I think that that has an effect of excluding a lot of people who would be valuable for our tech companies. I think that there is a societal attitude in Russia to get over and also in the sector itself. My personal experience, having worked on a lot of engineers over time with all sorts of ages, is that there is no reason at all why we cannot develop that as an avenue for older citizens to work in. Ideas that incentivise companies to hire and train older workers would be valuable. Comments have been heard so far from other speakers. It is a great loss to our tech sector that we do not have a more enlightened view. It is very similar to the gender imbalance in tech. We are excluding half of our best people because, for some reason, the tech sector is institutionally sexist, whichever it might think of itself. That is how it looks in the numbers. It is institutionally ageist. What can Government do about that? Maybe we should be changing the language that we use in that area to make those behaviours less accepted and normalised. I was concentrating on age, but you brought in gender, which I find interesting. A quick question on that. Has it been sorted in the schools that it has to be at that stage that we would get more girls into IT? It is more than that, John. We do not teach tech or computing science to primary school children in an intensive way that we do with other subjects. The time that girls start to experience a subject and boys of that matter, the gender stereotypes have already been locked in. The bigger problem is that, if you are a young woman looking at the tech sector, there are no role models there or not enough. There are no exemplars, so it is a hostile environment. What we have also got to simultaneously do is make it socially unacceptable to operate an industry where 15 per cent of the staff or the engineers, in this case, are women, where 5 per cent of the leaders are women. That has got to become socially unacceptable. I would use the same tactics that we used for changing attitudes to drink driving. I changed the language that we use around that. The language that we use in businesses today is like social inclusion policy. We have aspirations to improve our gender balance, so that is all very soft and optional language. What we have in the industry is gender generalisation. If you are a woman, you can do certain jobs, but we are going to make it feel not normal to do those jobs in this area. We should be starting to ask companies to develop their policy to eradicate gender generalisation in their organisations or something like that. We have to de-normalise the situation. To this discussion, it is incredibly important, because we are losing roughly half of our best people for this industry because of the norms and attitudes. We can apply the same argument to ageism, but we have to look at the system response, not just the schools. It is also the other end of the chain in industry, where we have to apply some pressure, frankly. That is very helpful. I am interested in the phrase gender ghettoisation. I will give a final word on this to Paul Hunter, particularly on age, on how you see that. If you want to mention gender, I would be happy to hear. Thank you, John. More people are living longer and staying longer in the workplace, so we have that demographic mega trend. We need to train older people, so that is an urgent issue. With regard to the economic green shift, we are focusing on creating more jobs that are sustainable. There is an excellent opportunity to train older workers to move into those new roles, so we need to understand what those new roles can be. I know that it is uncertain, but Mark has mentioned the point that we perhaps have not focused as much on developing a renewable energy sector, and we have been importing expertise and goods from countries such as Denmark. We are back to the point about labour shortages. There is an excellent opportunity to retrain older workers, to promote jobs to older workers, and to explain clearly how we can retrain them, so that we can subsidise perhaps this retraining as well. That could link with the just transition, which was mentioned before. If older workers are working in carbonised industries and there is a threat of them losing their jobs, we can target them, we can retrain them, so that they do not lose their job and they can stay within the workplace. Thank you very much, convener. Are there any other questions that any member would like to ask at this point? No. In that case, can I ask if there is any of the panel that might like to make just a final comment if there is anything that we have missed? Thank you. In that case, that brings us to the end of our evidence session, and I thank our witness panel for joining us today and sharing their experience and expertise. We will now move into private session for the remaining agenda item.