People and Leadership
Cardiff Capital Region (CCR) partnered with PwC to address local social, economic, and skills needs by transforming its skills provision across five priority sectors, ultimately enhancing talent attraction and retention, promoting diversity, and supporting the region’s economic prosperity through a collaborative skills ecosystem involving multiple stakeholders.
Cardiff Capital Region (CCR) faced a need to identify and respond to local social, economic and skills needs. While the region’s new industries faced the common issue of attracting and retaining the talent they needed, graduates from its universities and colleges were leaving to find work elsewhere. CCR aimed to address these challenges by enhancing its current skill base and enabling local skills providers to prepare people for the jobs that would help secure the region’s economic prosperity.
With support from the Government’s UK Shared Prosperity Fund, CCR proposed to transform local skills provision for five priority clusters for the region – FinTech, Cyber, Creative Industries, Compound Semiconductors and MedTech. Specifically, the regional authority aimed to build capabilities in Digital, Net Zero and Advanced Manufacturing, while also promoting diversity and inclusion. However, local educational institutions lacked accurate and recent data on the skills required for jobs in the new clusters.
To identify and bridge the gap between skills supply and industry demand, PwC brought together a team that included national and international experts in the policy and practice of skills development, working in partnership with Cardiff and Vale College. Over three months, the cross-regional team led a transformative skills-discovery initiative and built a dynamic skills ecosystem that brought together 70+ employers, 20+ education providers, policymakers, industry bodies and local communities.
Through interactive workshops and data-driven insights, the programme team mapped labour market trends, job vacancies and course offerings, to identify critical gaps and opportunities across all skill levels. Those insights led to targeted recommendations that would help education and training providers align with industry needs, adapt to emerging trends and enhance workforce readiness. To address the complementary challenge of recruitment and retention, the initiative identified ways for employers to make opportunities more accessible and attractive for future talent.
While the discovery initiative helped drive new approaches to building capability in CCR’s priority clusters, PwC went further and identified how key capabilities could be developed in other sectors. In particular, the region’s new industries were low emitters of carbon, but the Construction sector was a major emitter, and one in which improved capabilities could help the region achieve its Net Zero targets. As a result, the final report delivered additional insights to help CCR achieve its broader aims.
One of PwC’s key innovations was to recognise that diversity and inclusion offered a way to harness untapped talent, and to propose non-traditional learning pathways that were more accessible to poorly supported demographics, such as school leavers, mid-career changers or returners. By combining skills and inclusion perspectives, the team helped grow the potential talent pool, to benefit both CCR’s industries and its local employment.
Not only has the work equipped educators, trainers and employers in South East Wales with the knowledge to build a more robust skills base for its new industries, but it has also left the region with a skills network that keeps employers and colleges in closer, ongoing dialogue to drive the region’s future prosperity.
View the PwC profile in the MCA Members Directory.