More firms have been urged to become involved in a campaign to bridge the gap between businesses and education.

Paul Mackie, chairman of the E3 Bradford initiative, told the organisation’s first summit that while 300 companies had provided 5,000 staff hours of support to schools and colleges in the past year, more needed to be done to inspire today’s youngsters and improve home grown skills to ensure they could thrive in a rapidly changing workplace.

Mr Mackie, who is also president of Bradford Chamber of Commerce, wants to see 1,000 businesses actively involved in E3 over the next year.

He said: “Over the past decade we have seen more technological change than at any time since the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago and that change will continue apace. If we are to develop home grown talent and convince and inspire today’s youngsters, we need to work closely with all types of education providers so they know what businesses require and the opportunities that exist.

“We can only succeed by working together and delivering action now, not just talking about what we should do. Technology has changed both our social and working lives and transformed business models and things will never go back to the way they were.” Technology expert Dave Coplin claimed that while IT had transformed the world of work, it had also turned many people off work.

Mr Coplin, chief envisioning officer at software giant Microsoft UK, told the conference that empowering and trusting employees would rekindle their interest in the job and benefit businesses. He said the future of work must be based on focusing on results, not process and on empowerment employees not hierarchy. Reimagining business is about waking up to a new environment based on collaborative working, on flexible working, on technology that, used correctly, liberates rather than constrains.

“The key message is empowerment. If you constrain what people can do, how they work, how they use the tools, how they think about their outcomes, then actually you constrain your own success.

“The job of managers is to set their employees free, to give them the data and tools to make their decisions, to hold them to account for a job well done but not to micromanage their every working moment.”

Mr Coplin said surveys had shown that only a third of people were actively engaged in their work. The E3 summit at Bradford City football club was attended by 200 business chiefs, education providers, school governors, parents and young people.