Sharing in Growth wins national skills innovation award

Sharing in Growth, the UK’s government-backed competitiveness improvement programme, has won the Semta Innovation Award for improving the capability and productivity of over 10,000 people working in the aerospace supply chain.

Celebrating the best of British engineering and manufacturing, the industry-backed Semta Awards, hosted by BBC journalist Steph McGovern, were held in London last week

Sharing in Growth (SiG) individually tailors and delivers an intense and integrated programme of training, coaching and mentoring for ambitious companies in the aerospace supply chain. Typically the four-year programme focuses on leadership, culture and operational capability delivered by SiG’s own 120 strong team of business coaches as well as a bank of world-leading experts including The University of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing, Deloitte, Industry Forum and the National Physical Laboratory.

Sharing in Growth provides on-site training, coaching and mentoring in a bespoke four-year business transformation / Picture: SiG

The SiG programme was created five years ago to upskill UK aerospace suppliers to achieve around 20% competitiveness improvement and so secure contacts and jobs. Endorsed by Airbus, BAE Systems, Boeing, Bombardier, GE, GKN, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin, MBDA, Rolls-Royce, Safran and Thales, SiG is supported by the Regional Growth Fund and more than £150 million in private investment. The programme is both ground-breaking and effective, having helped programme participants secure more than £2.3 billion in contracts through increased competitiveness and productivity.

Sharing in Growth CEO Andy Page, said: “Productivity is the economic challenge of our time. The scale of that challenge called for a radical approach that was supported across the industry and government. The Semta award recognises Sharing in Growth’s innovative approach to such a pressing issue. Sharing in Growth is making great progress by focussing on skills and best practice diffusion, quickly creating capability in the supply chain that can benefit from Government’s other investment in technology and infrastructure, aligned to the Industrial Strategy.“

Sharing in Growth targets the barriers to growth and is specifically aligned to a business output target. Training is delivered at participants’ workplaces which accelerates learning by working on real operational challenges. It also minimises operational disruption and makes the time commitment to training more affordable to smaller companies with big ambitions.

Andy added: “We have an intimate relationship with each client so we can support the leadership to invest in sustainable business transformation. I would say that we have created a new model for industry/government partnership, efficiently bringing funding, industry knowledge and professional training delivery together to achieve unprecedented results.”

Sharing in Growth won the Semta Innovation Award / Picture: SiG

Business Minister Richard Harrington, concluded: ”Sharing in Growth plays a valuable role in improving supply chain productivity and is exactly the type of programme the Government is committed to supporting through our Industrial Strategy. To date the programme has made a sustainable positive impact on UK competitiveness and raised the UK’s workforce skills and leadership capability.”

Sharing in Growth is currently working with 63 programme participants and has helped them to secure around 20,000 additional man years of work. Over 4,000 jobs have been secured so Sharing in Growth is well on track to its target of 10,000 jobs by 2022.