We are back for the third season of Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. If you're a new listener,

I am Jimmy McLaughlin, a former advisor to the Prime Minister on Business and Entrepreneurship.

The worst part of my job in number 10 was getting a phone call from someone like a FTSE

100 Chair just before the markets opened at 8am telling me that they were about to make

a large number of redundancies. For every job loss it not only affected an individual

but a family too. I would then have to go into the 8am meeting with the PM and explain

the news. The Prime Minister would come back and say, all we hear about is job losses

and yet we are at record high levels of employment. That was pre-coronavirus. Now 15 months

into the pandemic and the UK's job market is holding up strongly once again with lower

levels of unemployment than the US, Canada, France, Italy and Australia. Part of this is

the furlough scheme. But a longer term trend is the fact that UK entrepreneurs are creating

jobs each day which don't get the same media headlines. And that is what this show aims

to explore by speaking to those wealth and job creating entrepreneurs about the skills

they need in their fast growing businesses. This series will be going round the UK once

again interviewing the likes of Ben Francis who is building Jim Shark in the West Midlands

which now employs 800 people and is valued at over a billion pounds. The background to

Jimmy's jobs of the future is that I started it as a lockdown project whilst I was looking

after our baby daughter as my wife returned to the NHS to fight the pandemic. I had gone

from Downing Street to Dipers and I'll let you decide which job involved dealing with

more crap. I started the podcast without much clue of what I was doing. It was just something

that I could strategically record around that time. I was not sure if the podcast would

be a success. Frankly, I wasn't even really sure how to define success. If I could help

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