We often speak of the importance of skills to businesses.

For every business you need employees with good skills and know-how if you are going to produce the best products or provide a good service.

The importance of skills was strongly underlined recently with the announcement by Saudi firm AIC Steel Group that it was to take over the former Rowecord site in Newport, creating 120 jobs as a result.

Crucially, one of the key reasons that the company gave for its decision was the availability of a skilled workforce.

It seems clear that the new company will be taking on some of the skilled staff previously employed by Rowecord, and given their existing skills that makes perfect sense.

But there comes a point in many industries when companies experience skills shortages, and that is where we believe it is important that our education system in Wales develops young people with the skills that employers in Newport and elsewhere really need.

It is no good training young people on the basis of the skills that were needed in the workforce in years gone by. We have to train young people so that they have the skills that are needed by employers today. We also need to ensure that vocational skills are valued just as highly as academic skills, because they are equally important to our economy.

We are seeing an increasing numbers of small firms taking on apprentices, so that they can develop young people into the skilled workers that they so badly need. Indeed, such has been the uptake of the Young Recruits Programme, a Welsh Government scheme which assists small firms take on apprentices, it has been over-subscribed.

If we can develop the right skills among the workforce in Newport it will not only help existing businesses in south east Wales, but will also help to attract businesses from outside the area to locate here. If we do not have the right skills then there is no doubt that our whole local economy will suffer.