The Business Village People Podcast S2 E4 "I was a rebel at school, especially with my socks".

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This is the Business Village People podcast.  Hello, I'm David Markwell and welcome to the Business Village People podcast. This is episode four of series two. This podcast showcases stories from the companies, service providers, and staff at the business village, in Barnsley, South Yorkshire. Well, if you're ready, let's go!

In this episode of Business Village People, we meet a woman who was more impressed with her education from a local college than the one she received from a tuition-paying university.  According to the United Nations, the top five emitters of greenhouse gases are China, the USA, India, the European Union, and the Russian Federation.

That accounts for about 60 percent of the emissions in 2021. We'll be discovering what help is available to you to reduce your carbon emissions in your workplace, with a little bit of help from the business village. Also, we meet the brand new members executive for the Barnsley and Rotherham Chamber of Commerce.

It's time to meet our first guest. Laura Fish owns Fashion Toolbox, a company that is bridging the gap between traditional education and modernity and the ever-evolving world of fashion design. Fashion Toolbox is a little bit of a long story because it didn't start out as what it is today. It started out as an idea as part of my master’s, and I was working in the fashion industry for a very, very long time.

I think it was around 15 years.  And  when I got into the industry from university, I realized that there was a little bit of a skills gap, shall we say, and that I wasn't really prepared for everything that I needed to know within the industry. I've got to do a lot of learning on the job. When you say that, what do you mean?

Because you've, you've just did a master's degree. Is that right? I did my BA first. Right. Okay. You've done your BA first. You've come out. ready to be working in the fashion industry, but you felt as though you were lacking certain skills. Yeah, I would say more like the technical skills. I did learn a lot.

I learned a lot about fashion design and pattern cutting.  But then when you're in the industry, industry. There's so many different roles that I felt like I wasn't even informed about, to be honest. And how did that make you feel? Because you've just spent three years and got probably into a lot of debt to come out and not be able to do the job you wanted to do.

Yeah, I'm quite frustrated. I mean, I was, I did get into the job that I wanted to do, but I felt like there was a lot of learning on the job to do and a lot of upskilling, which was quite frustrating. Yes, obviously, after spending all that money, then it was a little bit of, I did courses here and there in my own time to learn, particularly in like digital skills, Adobe Illustrator is massively required within the industry.

And I just didn't, I wasn't taught it. So I think I had one lesson while I was in university.  So I taught myself, um, pretty much. And then, yeah, when I asked others, they felt pretty much the same way. They didn't have the skills. So when I worked in the industry for quite a few years, as I said, and then this became a real like passion project thinking there's all these people that haven't got the skills that we need to join forces and upskill.

So when I went back to do my masters.  I decided to focus particularly in fashion education and did a heck of a lot of research into the history of education, how it's evolved over time or not evolved. And I guess this is, um, I'm generalizing in a way because I looked majorly at the UK and the fashion education system here, but there are, um, other areas that Doing a lot more to support students and bring more innovation and digital skills on board, but within the UK I found that it was quite lacking and to be honest at that time  so I bui