One of the biggest challenges that we face is the fact that, despite the very good school results that we get from the local education system, the people who get those good results leave the area for higher education and other job opportunities, which creates a skills gap because those who remain are not trained up for the jobs that exist in the region. We need to address that skills gap for the new agency and for all the other agencies that can make a contribution, such as Skills Development Scotland and the local colleges.
The other interesting question is why so many people stay. They do not all leave—some young people stay. In my view, something has been changing in the region over the past five or 10 years. There is a new energy and what you might call green shoots. You may have heard of a local organisation called the Stove Network, in Dumfries, which is doing some interesting things with young people and getting them involved in town centre development. It places an emphasis on art, culture and creative activities to encourage them to express themselves and be engaged with what is happening in their own lives.
We could do a lot more, not just through education but by creating the kind of place that young people want to live in. You have probably heard about millennials. We talk a lot about millennials in my office, because they are apparently very different from baby boomers. I will make no comment on which of us around the table might be a baby boomer, but managers tend to be baby boomers and young people coming into the workplace tend to be millennials.
I am told that the key difference is that baby boomers do not really have an interest in work-life balance—we just work, work, work—whereas the middle generation, generation X, are interested in work-life balance and the millennials, who are the youngest group coming into the workplace, are interested in life-work balance. They place as much attention on the quality of their life around work as they do on work. We have a fabulous environment to offer young people. If we could knit together some of the strengths of the natural environment, the art and culture of the area and the job opportunities, we could get more to stay.