About Us

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Our purpose is to improve productivity, efficiency and effectiveness in the industries we cover – property, housing, facilities management, cleaning and parking.

We do this by working with employers to ensure their staff and potential staff have the skills they need to do their work well. We focus on three core activities:

• Qualifications - We make sure all careers in our sector are backed by sound occupational standards. These are descriptions of what you need to know and do in a particular job. They form the basis of qualifications like apprenticeships and NVQs (National Vocational Qualifications, Scottish Vocational Qualifications in Scotland) or qualifications run by professional bodies

• Employer engagement - This is at the heart of our work. Although licensed by Government, we are employer led with no civil servants on our boards. Our teams visit employers to identify skills gaps and try and find solutions.

• Labour Market Information - Good research with a practical bent means we can understand better what is happening in terms of markets, working practices and technological change. This helps ensure we have a strategy designed to be of practical help as well as a source of information for employers.

UK wide remit

We are a UK wide organisation with representation and employer led boards in each of the home countries.

We recognise that, to be fully effective, solutions need to be tailored to individual employer needs and will vary by country and region.

Asset Skills also runs projects like the Women and Work programme that subsidises training for many. Plus, we lead the network of Sector Skills Councils on promoting schemes to improve general workplace or "employability" skills across all industries.

The Leitch Review

In 2006 Lord Leitch published his report "Prosperity for all in the Global Economy: World Class Skills" which focused on the UK's long term skills needs and set out ambitious goals for 2020.

The report recommended far-reaching reform and said the UK must urgently raise achievements at all levels of skills.

Responsibility for achieving this must be shared between Government, employers and individuals.

The report is available below in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF). If you do not have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer you can download the software free of charge from the Adobe web site.

Prosperity for all in the global economy - world class skills. Leitch Final Report

If you are an employer in any of our sectors and would like to help shape the type of training available, we would like to hear from you. Please contact us on 01392 423 399 or 01604 233 336 or email info@assetskills.org