Overcoming Milton Keynes Barriers to Growth

A really interesting meeting took place in Milton Keynes a few days ago.  Business people from companies large and small came together with people from education including UCMK and Milton Keynes College under the auspices of the city’s new Chamber of Commerce.  They’d all come to meet Lord Adonis who was schools minister and Transport Secretary in the last government.  He’s on a nationwide tour gathering information to put into Labour’s growth strategy which is expected to be a cornerstone of the party’s election campaign.

It was really interesting to hear business people talk about borrowing money to expand.  We’re constantly hearing how difficult it is for companies to get money from the banks, yet those in Milton Keynes who wanted seven figure sums say borrowing such amounts really isn’t a problem.  Perversely, it was those directors who needed between quarter and half a million pounds who said it was a real struggle.  The old adage is still true; owe the bank a pound and the manager will forever be on your back.  Owe them a million pounds and he will take you out to lunch.

If one expression rang out loud and clear from the event it was skills gap.  There were irritations about recruits being unable to spell properly, being incapable of writing coherent reports, using text speak in business documents and so on, and this related as much to graduates as to employees at any other level.  However, many of those same individuals were extremely adept with their digital skills and understood effective electronic communication, use of social media etc.  What was not entirely surprising from my own experience but which should be shocking is the inability so many employers identified among recent graduates to turn up on time, to meet set deadlines and to take a degree of responsibility for their own work.

One thing the meeting suggested to me that people are coming to understand more is that not everybody should go to university.  Apprenticeships and Higher Apprenticeships (some of which are equivalent to an MSc) are starting to come into their own, and that has to be a good thing.  Some skills are better taught in the apprenticeship environment, and the association of the individual with a business throughout their training can only help to build those so-called soft skills relating to communication and employability.  Perhaps it is time for schools to be brave and to say to some of their students, “You have a great future ahead of you and actually, taking a good apprenticeship might be a better route for you than the obvious one of going to university.”  Germany is always held up as the example of best practice in this area and it’s often pointed out that in that country vocational skills are not looked upon as in any way less valuable than academic ones.  It’s all about what the individual can bring to the business and a degree certificate per se doesn’t always guarantee their value.

Getting the apprenticeship model right will require cooperation between, schools, Milton Keynes College and ourselves.   There are areas where we compete with each other for pupils – and that’s not a bad thing.  Competition ensures we don’t become complacent and that we’re all always striving to provide the offering that young people will choose.  However, there has to be a coordinated approach so people can move between the different kinds of institutions with a seamless integration of opportunity.  We have to be flexible – not all employers can afford to have a number of their people taking the same day off every week for the College-based element of their apprenticeships.  Our joint offerings have to fit the people being trained AND the businesses they’re being trained for.  I look forward to Lord Adonis report, but even more I look forward to sitting round some more tables with colleagues from business and education to find the best ways of closing that skills gap.

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Big Data is changing the world for us all

Big Data is coming soon to have an impact on your life.  In fact, the use of big data is already changing the way you shop and the way things are sold to you.  Every time you go to buy a book on Amazon it will make recommendations about other books you might like.  It achieves this by crunching untold numbers of tiny bits of information, not only about you but more importantly about all the other people around the world who read the books you like.  There is a lot of big data out there.  Google Chief Executive, Eric Schmidt, says five Exabytes of information were generated from the dawn of civilisation up until 2003.  That same amount of information is now created every two days.  If that weren’t enough, one Exabyte is one billion gigabytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 different pieces of information.

With that in mind, MK:Smart, the multi-agency project to analyse big data relating to transport, water and energy in Milton Keynes, is going to have to look at a lot of information.  We’re going to be ready to go in March, but we’re still working out which pieces of data are the right ones to use to provide answers to the questions at the heart of the project.  The clever bit is not just working out how to process it and relate different collections of data to each other but deciding what to keep and analyse and what to ignore.  Not that it’s that simple of course.  Data which is useful for improving traffic flow may be of no value to the study of water usage and vice versa.  Information can only be defined as junk in relation to a specific project and it might be absolutely pivotal to another.  Therefore, everything we collect we will need to store in such a way that it can be accessed when it does become relevant.

If this all sounds a bit esoteric it’s important to understand just how important big data can be.  The American McKinsey Global Institute produced a report about big data eighteen months ago.  It points to the experience of the German Federal Employment Agency.  In British terms this would be a combination of Job Centre Plus, the National Careers Service and a big chunk of the Department for Work and Pensions.  The Agency employs 120,000 people and it has embraced big data techniques to help it manage such a sprawling bureaucracy more efficiently.  The results have helped it save more than £8bn to date, a little less than the entire annual budget of the Home Office.  If MK:Smart can be anything like as successful the results for everyone who lives here will be transformational.

In such a new world there are opportunities and gaps to be filled.  From September 2014 UCMK plans to offer a new Bachelor of Science Honours Degree in Data Science.  The same McKinsey report I referred to earlier reckons on an immediate shortfall of up to 190,000 graduates in this field in the United States alone.  It’s an area where government, the corporate world and academia are going to be competing for the most talented people and there will be some very exciting and well-rewarded careers to be had.

Big Data will change the world, and it’s incredibly exciting and exhilarating to think that here at UCMK we’re going to be right at the heart of that change.

Inspiration to beat the January Blues

I’ve decided – this is an inspiring time of year.

It’s so easy to feel everything is a little bit bleak in the grey weeks of January, but I’m delighted to say the first days of 2014 have brought me nothing but inspiration.

I’ve just been to a really exciting conference all about Big Data.  You may already be aware that UCMK is at the heart of a ground-breaking project to crunch huge quantities of information relating to transport, water and energy in Milton Keynes called MK:Smart (to learn more, go to http://www.mksmart.org/ ).  It’s an area which is in its infancy but the importance of it is unmistakable.  We heard from big companies like Intel and Experian about their plans and it’s fair to say the future of big data will create lots of imaginative collaborations between business and academia.  We both need each other to make it work but the implications are massive for how the world is planned and run in the future.  People have always collected large amounts of data but the interconnectedness of everyone now means we can actually start using it in ways which will be both commercially profitable and socially beneficial.

I’ve been back to school; Shenley Brook End school to be precise.  The school hosted the Great Education Debate all about the future of teaching and learning and it was extremely thought-provoking.  Should we follow the example of countries like South Korea or Singapore in making everything about passing exams?  Is education about happiness and fulfilment, the joy of learning – and if so, how do we most effectively measure these things?  How do we make the teaching profession more desirable and less of a punch bag to encourage our best minds into it?  Are disciplines like Drama and Sociology undervalued and under threat?  Lots of food for thought.

A further source of inspiration for our future is the Entrepreneurialism Group of which I’m also a member.  It’s made up of people from business, academia and education who work with local children, some as young as ten or eleven, who show real signs of having a head for business, having powerful, potentially commercial ideas and who have the drive to possibly even build something which could make money.  It’s not just about saying, “Aren’t you great,” and then leaving them to their own devices.  The intention is to give them real structures and processes they can use to make their business dream reality.  Some of these children have really interesting ideas and if we as a group can help them develop, market and exploit them, the possibilities really are endless.  The project involves young people from Hazeley Academy and Two Mile Ash Primary School and has already produced a new, educational treasure hunting app for the Android platform.  Milton Keynes is bursting with small businesses run by one or two people, and it’s never too early to open children’s eyes to the possibility that they can be their own boss.

The city and the university are bursting with ideas.  Dismiss the winter blues and be inspired!

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