Welcome to FE Soundbite edition 651. FE Soundbite is our weekly e-newsletter and journal, highlighting the latest news on FE News from the past week, interesting thought leadership articles and maybe a few things that I found interesting along the way. This is edition 651.. and it is a cracker!

Did you check out this article by the Welsh Economy Minister Vaughan Gething:

First up, we had a very cool exclusive article from Vaughan Gething on the Welsh Gov's Young Person’s Guarantee. Vaughan is the Welsh Economy Minister and the Young Person's Guarantee is really interesting. One thing that really stands out for me is the active way that the Welsh Government are encouraging young people to start up their own businesses. This is really interesting. The Welsh Government is investing £5m to support 1,200 young people to start their own business.... and In the long-term, the wider aim is for 90% of 16 to 24-year-olds in Wales will be in education, employment, or training by 2050. This is a really interesting article.

I think this is really interesting, as many (not all) young people want to run their own business, or go self employed, so why not equip them straight away. Using Entrepreneurship to tackle the NEET puzzle... is very interesting and I hope it is incredibly successful, as for every successful business owner, they need more staff and leads to more opportunity. I would highly, highly recommend checking it out.

Interesting thought leadership from this week

My mate Jamie Smith: Teaching, Learning & Robots: The Rise of Adaptive Learning with Artificial Intelligence - at the time of writing this has been our most popular exclusive article on FE News this week! I would highly recommend grabbing a coffee (or in honour of Jamie, a glass of Cucumber juice) and checking it out!

Suzanne Slater wrote a very interesting piece: SMEs are key to unlocking apprenticeships for disadvantaged young people - I couldn't agree more! Suzanne's article has been running neck and neck with Jamie's as the most popular this week!

Heather wrote a great piece about Re-thinking Careers Advice! ... again I couldn't agree more! My mate David Jones followed up on the recent L&W and WorldSkills UK report on Green Skills Gaps with this piece: More needs to be done to ensure the demand for green skills is realised - again, I couldn't agree more!

ETF's Cerian Ayres wrote a cool piece on Why we must keep on re-committing to inter-sectoral learning if technical education is to thrive.

I've literally had all my work mates writing this week... another good friend of FE News is Mark Cosens who asks: Where will all the skilled workers come from? This is a really important question! If you don't know Mark as yet, read this and you will be a fan!

Lightcast

Many of you know and love Emsi. Well big news coming out of Emsi Burning Glass this week... Emsi Burning Glass Announces New Name – Lightcast.

Cool reports and announcements that stood out to me:

Paul Warner gave us a sneak peek the other day in his exclusive article.... but AELP and ERSA report calls for barriers to be removed between employability and skills services... this is so great to hear. I couldn't agree more, we need to all work together and be joined up!

A bit more Transparency please:

DfE tell Universities that adverts should be honest with prospective students about graduate outcomes! I think this is interesting to see where this goes! Also... does this imply that some uni's were economical with the truth on graduate outcomes!? Interesting to see what this means for FE, Skills, Apprenticeships and Bootcamps!

A Tory MP has urged the Government to publish a “cross-departmental strategy” on the staffing crisis in colleges. Interesting!

SkillsWorld Stateside

...and if you missed it last night... my mate Tom Bewick was live from Washington with SkillsWorld Stateside.. checking out the latest developments in Apprenticeships and Skills in the US of A. Tom has really pushed the boundaries with SkillsWorld... earlier in the season he had a dedicated episode with Skills Minister Alex Burghart and Shadow Skills Minister Toby Perkins... with a really great multi-cam / multi angle interview with the Skills Minister. It is fantastic to see Skills World going from strength to strength!