European textile firms cannot attract graduates to fill skills gap
08/02/2019
A new project called Blueprint is a sequel to the European Union’s Digital Textile, Clothing, Leather and Footwear (TCLF) Industries project, which held its closing event in Brussels on February 8.
Blueprint is about improving the quality of training in TCLF, enhancing employability and facilitating career development for people already working in these sectors.
The organisations running Blueprint are going to identify eight TCLF occupations that are well suited to upskilling. By the start of 2019, they had identified two already: digital marketing functions and sustainability expertise. “I emphasise that we don’t mean these as job titles, but as broader areas of work in a TCLF organisation,” Rob Senden, director of IVOC, the Belgian ready-made clothing training organisation and one of the organisations involved, told sportstextiles at the Brussels event.
Both areas seem likely to encompass the sort of job large numbers of young people want to do; many have studied these subjects at university and gained impressive qualifications in marketing and in sustainability and environmental management. Rob Senden said that this is true, but insisted that the young people coming out of university with these qualifications are choosing jobs in sectors outside TCLF. “It seems that our companies are not the kind of business these young people want to work in,” he said. “That’s why the company leaders we have spoken to have almost given up on trying to recruit them. They think training their own knowledgeable people to fulfil these roles is a better bet.”
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