Steph McGovern speaking at the 2025 Chamber Gala Dinner 

Guernsey has full employment. It also has a workforce crisis.

Chamber members report the same problem repeatedly: they cannot find the talent they need. Despite every available worker being employed, businesses face shortages across all roles and in all industries.

That’s why the Chamber invited BBC’s Steph McGovern as the guest speaker at their annual Gala Dinner.

At nineteen, Steph was named Young Engineer for Britain as an apprentice at Black & Decker. She went on to study at University College London, became an award-winning BBC business journalist, and now runs a retail company employing over 150 people. Throughout her career, she’s championed vocational skills and practical education, perhaps this is the approach Guernsey needs?

After spending the day at The Guernsey Institute meeting apprentices and training leaders, McGovern delivered her verdict at the Chamber’s annual dinner: Guernsey’s skills challenge is solvable, but only if education fundamentally changes.

How industry-led education transforms lives

McGovern’s passion for vocational learning came from lived experience. Growing up in Middlesbrough, “deemed the worst place to grow up as a girl”, she attended a City Technology College sponsored by industry.

“We were taught from a young age about industry. I knew what supply chain was when I was 13. The school was very much focused on not what we couldn’t achieve, but what we could and what skills would be useful for the local economy.”

The results? Classmates from deeply challenging backgrounds now run successful businesses, McGovern herself went from teenage engineer to award-winning broadcaster to business owner.

“In the UK, there is not the same value for people who’ve learned practical vocational stuff as there is for academic. That is a massive error,” she said. “We saw in the pandemic the most useful people were the people with hands-on skills.”

At The Guernsey Institute, she’d met an 82-year-old adult learner, which proved her point. “Lifelong learning should be a thing. You don’t have to stop education at 18 or 20. Why can’t you dip in and out when you need to?”

She pointed to Singapore’s credit system, where workers receive funding at different life stages to retrain, with qualifications aligned to economic needs. Could this be a piece of the puzzle?

Housing: the key to unlocking skills.

Even the best skills training fails if trained workers cannot afford to live here.

“You’ve got to sort your housing out,” McGovern said bluntly. “There needs to be an entry level where you can afford a house that isn’t over half a million. Those might be the people who invent the next business here.”

For Chamber members, the connection is direct. Train a young person brilliantly, but if they cannot afford housing, they leave for the UK. Convince a healthcare worker to relocate, but without affordable options, they go elsewhere – and they are in demand everywhere. “Unless you’re willing to pay healthcare workers far more than anywhere else, you need affordable housing to attract them,” she noted.

This reframes both issues as economic infrastructure. Skills training without housing is incomplete, housing without skills training shuffles the same shortage between employers. Both must work together.

Guernsey’s advantage

McGovern saw genuine opportunity in Guernsey’s size. Unlike the UK, where bureaucracy and disconnected stakeholders slow everything down, Guernsey has structural advantage: everyone’s accessible. Businesses have access to the educators, and  Guernsey Chamber can reach government decision-makers, so the conversation between what skills businesses need and what education provides can move quickly.

McGovern’s Middlesbrough school succeeded because industry engaged, shaped curriculum, and stayed involved. Guernsey businesses can do the same, faster and more effectively, because they’re already in relationship with the people who matter.

The opportunity

Businesses are clear: talent shortage is stalling growth right now. With full employment masking deeper workforce challenges and demographic pressures intensifying, doing nothing means decline. However, McGovern left the room with her view on the way forward:

Guernsey has advantages competitors cannot replicate: quality of life, community, environment, tax structure. What holds it back are solvable problems.

Small islands that move quickly outmanoeuvre larger competitors that move slowly. That’s Guernsey’s structural advantage – if businesses, educators, and government work together and are ambitious and agile – real progress is within reach.

“Everything’s cyclical, and it will all be all right in the end,” McGovern said. But she was clear: that outcome requires action, not optimism.