Apprenticeship awards launch in Oxfordshire

Published by

Nicky Godding

Dozens of business leaders, apprentices and education providers came together for the Oxfordshire Apprenticeship Awards 2020 launch, part of an Oxfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership (OxLEP) apprenticeship Q&A and skills forum.

The launch event – held at the Sadler Building at Oxford Science Park and led by OxLEP Skills – saw previous winners, potential 2020 award applicants and key players from across the Oxfordshire skills ‘landscape’ come together to discuss the success of apprenticeships and some of the challenges businesses can face in offering them.

Titled: ‘Apprenticeships – working for you’, the breakfast event hosted a guest panel who shared their experiences and advice on apprenticeships alongside a question and answer session, as well as the official awards launch.

Next year’s Oxfordshire Apprenticeship Awards will be taking place at Williams F1 Conference Centre on Thursday 2 April. It follows the success of this year’s event, which saw around 150 people attend the awards at Jurys Inn Oxford.

Nigel Tipple – Chief Executive of OxLEP – said: “The recently-launched Oxfordshire Local Industrial Strategy lays out the priority to set clear pathways for young people to develop the skills needed to secure future employment opportunities.

“Many Oxfordshire businesses are committed to creating apprenticeships, seeing them as a positive way of developing a highly-trained workforce for the future – through the 2020 awards, we hope to engage even more businesses.

“Discovering young talent through apprenticeship schemes can help businesses to ‘stay ahead’ of competitors and – in-turn – support young people to gain great qualifications too.”

Nicky Godding

Nicky Godding is editor of The Business Magazine. Before her journalism career, she worked mainly in public relations moving into writing when she was invited to launch Retail Watch, a publication covering retail and real estate across Europe. After some years of constant travelling, she tucked away her passport and concentrated on business writing, co-founding a successful regional business magazine. She has interviewed some of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs who have built multi-million-pound businesses and reported on many science and technology firsts. She reports on the region’s thriving business economy from start-ups, family businesses and multi-million-pound corporations, to the professionals that support their growth and the institutions that educate the next generation of business leaders.