Nicholas Wyman

Nicholas Wyman (born 10 February 1968) is a youth unemployment expert and the CEO of WPC Group Ltd., an Australian apprenticeship employment company. He speaks and writes on the challenges of employee retention, youth unemployment, and labour shortages and is a regular guest on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio National and ABC Local Radio. He also commentates on apprenticeships and vocational training in US publications, as well as in China, Singapore and Australia. Wyman founded the Institute for Workplace Skills and Innovation which combines a number of companies which provide apprenticeships and associated training and Skilling Australia Foundation.
Personal life
Wyman was born in 1968 in Melbourne, Australia. He attended Ivanhoe Grammar School as a student in the 1970s. He has studied and researched at both Harvard Business School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government. In 1988, he captained the Australian Olympic Youth Team at the IKA Culinary Olympics in Frankfurt, Germany winning gold for Australia.
Wyman and his wife, Prue, currently reside in Melbourne, Australia and have two children, Alexandra and James.
Career
Wyman is Park Family Churchill Memorial Fellow, awarded in 2012 to study a new approach to engaging young people in skilled careers in Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Australia and the United States. He has presented at the Low Carbon Earth Summit in Dalian, China, National Sustainability Conference at the National University of Singapore, Growing the Sustainable Workplace Conference at the University of Sydney, dedicated to climate change, and the impact of the financial crisis on young people at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He published his work in many professional magazines, including articles in Chief Executive Magazine and The Australian Institute of Company Directors Magazine. He spoke at the 2011 Travel and Tourism Training Summit in topic of workforce development in the 21st century.
He established South East Asia's first Mentored Apprenticeship Program called LAMP, and he also coined the phrase "Middle" Skills Gap, to refer to the excess of openings for jobs requiring technical qualifications. The term has been used widely by academics, as well as the Harvard Business Review. In 2013, Wyman joined the United States Secretary of Labor to mark 100 years of apprenticeships in the United States.
He is also a member of advisory panel at the TAFE Directors Australia (TDA), a peak national body incorporated to represent Australia's 61 government-owned Technical and further education (TAFE) institutes and university TAFE divisions, and the Australia-Pacific Technical College (APTC), as well as advisory committee member of the Australian Long-Term unemployment Conference.
Community Employment Campaigns
Wyman co-founded Jobs 1001, a community employment campaign with media partner News Limited with an aim to create 1001 new jobs in 101 days. Only a month after its launch, the Jobs 1001 campaign has reached its employment target, with a total of 1376 jobs generated, earning praise from Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard.
In July 2013, Wyman co-founded a new employment initiative called Vote1 Jobs focused on unemployed citizens of Melbourne. The program is intended to ensure employment for 60 young people into an apprenticeship, traineeship or direct employment. The program was supported by Kevin Rudd, the Prime minister of Australia.
In 2014, Wyman co-founded another jobs campaign. The Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott backed the Jobs 2014 campaign. Large employers, including Woolworths Limited, joined the campaign creating 200 new skilled jobs. The campaign created 2394 jobs with 112 local mastheads reaching over 4.4 million readers in the final week of the campaign.
Writing
In 2015, Wyman wrote a book called "Job U: How to Find Wealth and Success by Developing the Skills Companies Actually Need". The book was released in January 2015 and published by Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House. The book received reviews from Eric A. Spiegel, President and CEO, Siemens USA. The book won a 2015 International Book Award in the Business: Career Category.
Wyman has written for PBS, MSNBC, and is a contributing writer for the Huffington Post and Forbes.

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