World Youth Skills Day is a campaign to drive the message to give young people the skills to help bring prosperity to their lives, and the communities that they live in. The theme for this year focuses on the importance of providing proper training to the youth and creating skills for decent work, employment, and entrepreneurship.
National Windscreens is proud of its record of training its young employees and the promotion opportunities within the business. This is evidenced by Mark Payne, board director at National Windscreens, who is now celebrating 34 years with the business, and started as a trainee windscreen fitter in 1988.
Charlotte Wright, Training Manager at National Windscreens, expands on the importance of teaching young people the skills and support that can help them develop and flourish.
“At National Windscreens, we pride ourselves in the continuous development of our people. We have created a learning culture by providing regular training to our team and supporting individual transformation. This helps to build a knowledge base that shapes strategy and processes within the business.
Our learning culture compromises of:
- Supporting managers with learning initiatives
- Continuous sharing of feedback
- Social and Collective learning initiatives
- Team encouragement to learn and reflect on their work
- Varied delivery channels
“Instead of concentrating on creating a culture for learning, we reframed a ‘learning culture’ as the ‘environment’ for learning, which allows for a constant improvement of how we train and upskill individuals.
“For young people, skills development is an essential prerequisite for sustainable development, moving young people into productive employment and skilled work. Unfortunately, a lack of work experience can often be a stumbling block that makes it hard to secure employment so building confidence is key.
“Young people require a new set of skills to become resilient and self-reliant and can inspire those with an entrepreneurial mindset. Entrepreneurship creates jobs while serving as an attachment to the labour market, and cultivates a soft skillset of initiative, creativity, and autonomy to prepare the young people for future challenges.
“Whilst it goes without saying that COVID-19 has had a hugely detrimental impact on young people and businesses, it has inspired an entrepreneurial spirit within National Windscreens and the youth of the UK. People are searching for solutions and purpose, looking not just to survive, but to thrive.
“To cope with evolving skills demands, National Windscreens are investing in new learning pathways, setting-up innovative initiatives, and programmes, and developing new partnerships. Responsive skills development programmes must have functional consistency, but also the development of transversal skills and competences that will enable the youth to respond to changing industry demands,” adds Charlotte.
As well as investing directly in its employees, National Windscreens also supports the activities of Autoraise, the vehicle repair industry’s charity. who commit to reversing the skills shortage by presenting the vehicle repair industry to young people as a genuine alternative to other employment opportunities, further education, or university.
If you are interested in joining a company that supports and develops its staff with ongoing training and opportunities for progression, please visit our jobs website to explore the opportunities at National Windscreens.