Over the past twenty five years, UK skills policy has focused primarily on boosting the supply of skilled or qualified labour. Despite significant progress on this front, British productivity continues to lag behind that of our major competitors, while policy makers increasingly confront the challenge of ensuring that skills are utilised effectively in the workplace. With policy in this area relatively under-developed in the UK, the paper considers the lessons that might be drawn from Australia’s recent experiment with skill ecosystem projects. These represent an attempt to integrate skills policy within a broader business and economic development agenda and are explicitly aimed at helping organisations, in a particular sector or region, to enhance their capacity to develop and deploy skills. The paper explores the origins of the ‘skill ecosystem’ concept, the factors that led to it being adopted in the Australian context and the results of early project evaluations, before considering whether the UK might benefit from a similar approach. While a skill ecosystem programme can go some way towards addressing the challenge of skill utilisation, there are nevertheless limits to what can be achieved given the current neo-liberal growth model.
