Young professionals are set to feature in a new campaign designed to attract talent to the county and overcome Cumbria's growing skills emergency. Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership held a special event today to mark one year since the formation of the Cumbria Careers Hub. The event at the LEP's conference and business centre in Redhills, near Penrith, was also used as an opportunity to launch a new campaign intended to inspire Cumbrian youngsters to find careers in their local area. At the same time, the organisation is also developing another campaign - set to go live this year - which will target young people from the outside the area and encourage them to move into Cumbria. LEP chief executive Jo Lappin told a packed room of attendees that, at present, due to Cumbria's ageing and reducing population "our economy and everything to do with our ways of life isn't sustainable". "We have got the slowest growing population of any LEP area in England," she said. "In 10 years we will have 20,000 too few people to fill the jobs we've already got. "We can't grow sufficient young people to fill the gap. "If we had everyone that's not in the labour market at the moment working, we would probably fill about 20 per cent of the gap. "The number of 18 to 24-year-olds that leave us probably outweighs every other group that come in." In order to combat this, the LEP has launched its Our Future campaign. This will involve using imagery and a specially produced video across social media and other platforms - such as a poster campaign on the side of buses in Cumbria - to show examples of young people who have made a career in the county. The campaign has already been launched on social media and is due to be rolled out elsewhere. A further campaign, named Your Future, is also set to be launched later in the year. This will again highlight the success stories of local people working in a variety of sectors, but be aimed at those living outside the county. John Reynolds, the LEP's head of communications, said it had been working with social media professionals to target 14 to 25-year-old people in Cumbria for the Our Future campaign. It was in the process of developing a specific strategy for targeting those outside of the county. The Your Future campaign will highlight attractive aspects of Cumbria as a place to live and work, including its cultural and creative offer, as well as aspects such as the lack of congestion. John said the "collateral" would be placed at places popular with visitors, as well as transport hubs, although these locations were being finalised. The LEP had been able to develop the case studies, video and imagery by working with its partners in the business world and identifying stories among their employees. As the skills shortage was a long term problem, the campaigns had an open ended timeline, he said. Mike Smith OBE, LEP board member and chair of its people, employment and skills strategy group, said the LEP was looking into ways it could analyse available data to judge the efficacy of the campaigns in the future. "One of the key things is how we ensure longevity," he said. "This is not a short sprint, it's a long haul. How do we maintain that momentum?" The day was also used as a chance to celebrate and thank those involved with the Cumbria Careers Hub. The hub works with employers in the county and aims to strengthen links between the world of work and the curriculum. Employers work with their networks, the wider business community and the hub to give strategic support to clusters of secondary schools and colleges to help strengthen careers provision. After an initial introduction, attendees went into specific workshops aimed at making sure the hub continues to develop. The hubs are assessed on their performance against the Gatsby benchmarks, which judge a variety of different areas of careers education performance. An assessment is carried out each academic term by the Careers and Enterprise Company. Last year the Cumbria hub was rated as one of nine top quartile performers among the 38 LEP areas in England. The Careers and Enterprise Company is one of the funders of the hub alongside the LEP which also part funds and manages it. Mr Smith said: "The careers hub and its success is an outstanding example of collaboration and team work. "We have so many different organisations involved it simply couldn't be possible without everyone's input."