A spotlight on… Jenny Shackleton

A pioneer in Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET), Jenny Shackleton’s influence has been felt in classrooms, government buildings, IGOs, and WorldSkills Competition arenas. From an early age, she excelled at her own education and was always determined to use it to shape fairer, more accessible, and more meaningful education systems.

Roots in reform

Jenny’s career began as a teacher and then a manager of colleges across the United Kingdom. Most notably she was the first woman Principal and Chief Executive of one of the largest Further Education colleges in the UK, based in Merseyside. Her work and her research built her a reputation as a reformer and innovator, intent on making education work well and work for everyone.

She says, “For me, I always saw Further Education as the change agent of society. It represents the difference between enhancing people’s life chances or preventing them from thriving.”

Her style of leadership and forward thinking caught the attention of the UK government and in 1991 she worked alongside Sir John Cassels to help shape education and skills policy as a Commissioner for the National Commission of Education.

In fact, it was Sir John who introduced Jenny to WorldSkills. He was about to step down as Chair of WorldSkills UK (or UK Skills as it was known then) and invited Jenny to use her experience and distinct approach to help improve its performance.

Elevating excellence for WorldSkills UK

With a mandate to transform Team UK’s performance, Jenny went to watch it in action at WorldSkills St Gallen 2003. It was there, at her first WorldSkills Competition, she saw a need to embed more rigorous standards and clearer assessment strategies.

Jenny made a commitment to lift Team UK up from around seventeenth place in the global rankings and started by looking outside the UK and to those TVET systems of the most successful WorldSkills Members. She also spent time working with researchers from Finland and Australia to learn from their findings and adopt ideas that might prove effective.

Back in the UK, with colleagues she embarked on an essential but challenging transformation. She asked every Expert to go through an appointment and retraining process. She also reduced the skill competitions entered to sixteen, putting in place improved standards of training and assessment. Once she was happy with the performance, she and her team then rapidly built the skills back up to more than 40 by 2011.

She recalls these measures were not popular but were needed, saying, “unfortunately, complacency had set in. As a team, we knew we needed to strip everything back down and rebuild it ‘root and branch’, not least because we wanted to host a future WorldSkills Competition.”

It worked. The reforms helped pave the way for a successful bid to host WorldSkills London 2011. Government funders and sponsors were expecting great things and the team including the WorldSkills UK Champions did not disappoint.

WorldSkills London 2011 was WorldSkills UK’s best performance at an international Competition, the team won 12 medals and ranked fifth in the medals table. As hosts, WorldSkills UK welcomed more than 200,000 visitors to the event, with nearly 40,000 receiving bespoke skills and careers advice. It is no exaggeration to say it helped kickstart a paradigm shift in the way skills were regarded nationally.

A new era of international standards

After the transfer of the management of WorldSkills UK to the National Apprenticeships Service for England, Jenny decided to step down from her role. She was already deeply involved in the international skills community from her research and had worked closely with WorldSkills International during WorldSkills London 2011.

To Jenny’s surprise, at that point she was approached to volunteer for WorldSkills as its Standards and Assessment Advisor. It became a pivotal moment for the organization as, for the next decade, Jenny spearheaded a comprehensive overhaul of how skills competitions are designed and assessed.

She remembers, “WorldSkills already knew it needed to embed workplace standards and benchmarks into the Competition. Without them, decisions around excellence were being left to competing ideas or subjective opinion.”

During the six months before WorldSkills Leipzig 2013, Jenny led the analysis of more than half the Technical Descriptions and skill competition assessments and got to work establishing a blueprint for what has become the WorldSkills Occupational Standards (WSOS).

She recalls, “It became very clear, very quickly, that skills competitions had to be about workplace readiness and that meant the standard had to be occupational – technically, and more broadly through transversal skills.”

Jenny tested the model and then rapidly introduced it across all skill competitions. Her eye for rigour and consistency moved onto assessments and, together with the Director of Skills Competitions, the Competitions Committee, and Skill Advisors, they revolutionized how skills competitions were designed and quality assured.

Jenny puts a lot of her success down to her purposeful motivation and independent viewpoint. She says, “I have deliberately kept a sense of separation so that I can help make objective decisions about what is best for skills, for young people and the organization. I know I am there simply to do good and to progress an important socioeconomic cause.”

Moving WorldSkills from global organization to international thought leader

The WSOS brought WorldSkills into strategic alignment with IGOs including UNESCO, the European Union, the ILO, and Cedefop. Through Jenny’s global benchmarking work, the organization found itself invited to work on UNESCO’s World Reference Levels and, to this day, WorldSkills sits around global tables leading on TVET reform.

Jenny says, “I am deeply confident about the robustness of our skill competitions and feel exceptionally privileged to see our work underpinning national and international strategies. Developing the WorldSkills Occupational Standards has brought us into a global community of people who think like we do and who I tremendously respect and learn a lot from.”

Though Jenny formally stepped down from her WorldSkills Standards and Assessment Advisor role in 2023, her support and influence endures. She mentors the WorldSkills Occupational Standards Development **team and supports new Members from WorldSkills Africa. In May this year, she was in Lusaka helping deliver a capacity building programme working with Experts from Plumbing and Heating, and Hairdressing.

Jenny also plays a leading role for WorldSkills within the OECD PISA-VET initiative, which is developing comparative assessments for TVET globally. She says, “We began with five occupations and are about to add another three. It is exciting to see WorldSkills materials form a basis of this work. This is only the case because our standards and live performance assessment model are respected by these global thought leaders.”

Leaving a legacy and looking ahead

As WorldSkills now looks forward to the future and develops Vision 2035, Jenny encourages Members to be open to change and remain willing to make comparable changes to those of a decade ago.

She reflects, “WorldSkills is at a challenging crossroad. We cannot simply keep scaling up and hope to sustain our impact. We need to recognize where our strengths are needed most for the future, and remodel the organization around these.”

Her message to Members in this anniversary year is: “Believe you are 75 years young and not 75 years old! Remember the post-war strong sense of purpose that was the origin of the organization back in the 1950s. Look for your energy so together you can ensure that WorldSkills stays relevant, useful, and valuable.”

Jenny Shackleton is a quintessential changemaker. She stands as a symbol of what it means to serve with vision, rigour, and purpose. Her career reminds us that when skills are done right, they change systems and they change lives.

Jenny was awarded Fellowship of WorldSkills after WorldSkills Lyon 2024; this prestigious, unique, and rare award recognizing her outstanding contribution to WorldSkills.

Look out for more stories about the people and events that helped build the WorldSkills movement.