Category: Labour Market

  • Employers will increasingly focus on graduates’ skills over technical knowledge

    Employers will increasingly focus on graduates’ skills over technical knowledge

    There are few safe bets about the future, so the impact of technology on labour markets, how transitions through education and into work will change, and the need to reskills and upskill, can only be predicted.

    But we do know that technology – AI in particular – is a disruptive force. We know that declining birth rates and higher employer skills needs have the potential to create a difficult labour market that hinders growth. We also know it’s likely that people who don’t adapt to changes in work could see their careers suffer.

    In response to these shifts, graduate and apprentice employers are considering fresh approaches to their talent strategies. Strategies that will focus less on a person’s age, education and technical experience, and more on their skills, capabilities and aptitudes.

    The Institute of Student Employers (ISE) recent report, From early career to emerging talent, shows that 68 per cent of early career employers have already adopted or partially adopted a skills-based strategy to hiring – and another 29 per cent are considering it.

    A constricted labour market

    Quite rightly, we are all concerned about the tough jobs market facing students, the high volumes of applications they make, and the time it takes many to get a graduate job. Because of the UK’s anaemic growth, the current labour market is tight (ISE predicts graduate vacancies will only grow by one per cent this year). But once growth returns to the economy, it’s likely employers will see significant talent shortages.

    We can see latent labour market problems in the current Labour Market Information (LMI) data. The UK’s unemployment rate at 4.4 per cent is historically low. Only 16.4m people in England and Wales are educated to level 4 or over – yet there are 18.6m jobs currently at that level, rising to 22.7m over the next 10 years. Over the next decade the working age population will increase only by 1.14m people (the over-70s, on the other hand, will increase by 2.1m).

    Mention 2022 and while most remember the heatwave, recruiters remember the post-pandemic growth spurt which left many vacancies unfilled. A CIPD labour market survey from summer of that year reported that 47 per cent of employers had hard-to-fill vacancies and the top response to difficulties reported by employers was to upskill existing staff.

    A problematic word

    What is a skill, an attribute or a capability? What can be taught, learned and developed, and what individual traits are innate? Some skills are technical, some more behavioural. And we’ll all have our own views on the abilities of ourselves and others. So, the word skills is problematic, which makes agreement on what approach we take to skills problematic.

    In their recent Wonkhe articles, Chris Millward and Konstantinos Kollydas and James Coe are right to highlight the challenge of differentiating between knowledge, technical behavioural and cognitive skills. To varying degrees, employers need both. I’d add another challenge, particularly in the UK: the link between what you study and what you do is less pronounced. Over 80 per cent of graduate recruiters do not stipulate a degree discipline. This makes connecting skills development to the labour market problematic.

    Another problem with the use of the word skills is the danger that we take a reductive, overly simplistic view of skills. A student who does a group activity successfully may think they’ve nailed teamworking skills. In reality, working with people involves a multitude of skills that many of us spend our working lives trying to master.

    Employers are already increasing their focus on skills

    In their report The skill-based organisation: a new operating model for work and the workforce, Deloitte describe how organisations are developing “a whole new operating model for work and the workforce that places skills, more than jobs, at the centre.”

    As recruitment for specific expertise becomes more challenging, people are matched to roles based on skills and potential, less on experience in a role. Skills-based hiring strategies encompass career changers, older workers, people who have near-to work experience. Technology maps an organisation’s skills base to create an internal marketplace for roles and employees are encouraged to re-skill and upskill in order to move about the organisation as jobs change.

    Graduates will need the skills and associated mindset to navigate this future world of work. World Economic Forum 2025 Future of Jobs analysis shows that 69 per cent of UK organisations placed resilience, flexibility and agility in the top five skills that will increase in importance by 2030.

    Graduate recruitment strategies could evolve to make less use of education exit points to define the talent pool hired from: career-changers, older-workers, and internal switchers are incorporated into development programmes. More learning content becomes focused on developing behavioural and cognitive skills to promote a more agile cohort.

    Students do develop skills

    Within HE, practitioners have already established a considerable body of knowledge, research and practice on employability skills. Where change is occurring, is in the campus-wide approach to skills that many institutions have developed (or are in the process of developing). Approaches that aim to ensure all students have the opportunity to develop a core set of skills that will enable them to transition through education and into work. Bristol and Kingston, among others, have shown how skills can be embedded right across the curriculum.

    I’m a big fan of Bobby Duffy’s work on delayed adulthood which suggests to me that the average student or graduate in their late teens and early twenties is at quite a different stage of development to previous generations. Which means that it’s wrong-headed to think of deficits in students’ work readiness as the fault of students (or their coddling parents).

    Employers and educators together have a role to play in helping students understand their own skills and how to develop them. Skills require scaffolding. Surfacing skills in the curriculum ensures students understand how their academic work develops core skills.

    And the provision and promotion of extra-curricular activities, including work experience, can be built into the student journey. Programmes where students develop their ability to deal with change and challenging situations, to analyse and solve complex problems, to adopt a positive approach to life-long learning.

    The skills agenda opportunity

    At the ISE we leave the language of skills gaps and employers’ apparent low opinion of graduates to the tabloids. Only 17 per cent of employers in our annual survey say they disagree that graduates are not work-ready. We do ask a more subtle question on the attitudes and behaviours that employers expect early career hires to possess when they start work. The top skills employers thought students weren’t as proficient in as they expected were self-awareness, resilience and personal career management.

    I am not, never have been, and never will be, a policy wonk. Maybe someone who is can design the architecture of incentives and systems that better connect education pathways to labour market needs. This architecture will also have to be able to predict labour market needs four to five years in advance, because that’s the lag between a typical students’ course choice and their job application. But if that can’t be done, surely a good investment is ensuring that students have plenty of opportunities to develop their skills and attributes to deal with an ever more changing workplace.

    Fully embracing a skills approach is a great opportunity to demonstrate how HE adds value to the UK economy through the triangulation of student interests, employer needs and a great education experience.

    Read the ISE’s report, From early talent to emerging talent, for a detailed analysis of the forces impacting how employers will hire and develop students in the future.

    Source link

  • We need to recognise the importance of maintenance too

    We need to recognise the importance of maintenance too

    The most obvious way that a university expresses what it values is what it chooses to pay for.

    At an institution level this might be about which kinds of jobs in which kinds of areas are funded. At a more personal level value is made clear by how people get in and get on in an institution.

    Promotion

    In reviewing promotion criteria of a number of universities, where it is not behind a login of some kind, one theme comes out time and time again. Promotion isn’t solely based on being consistently good at one thing. Promotion is about being able to be good at lots of things at once.

    Whether this is the hope that academics can be good researchers, teachers, and administrators all at once. The desire to find managers that can manage people as well as projects. And the forever quest for professional services that have innovative approaches of some kind.

    It isn’t fair to single out specific institutions as this is a sector wide phenomena but consider some of the language in the follow promotion criteria:

    • For a Grade 7 Assistant Professor “Evidence will be required of the ability to innovate and plan, and to execute plans competently”
    • For a Grade 9 lecturer role “Contributes to the planning, design and development of objectives and material, identifying areas for improvement and innovation.”
    • For a Grade 6 professional services role “You are involved in decisions that have an ongoing impact beyond your immediate team”
    • The job evaluation criteria for professional service staff “Will the role holder play an active part of any networks (connecting regularly with groups outside their team)? If so, please outline what these networks are, whether the role holder would be expected to establish the network, and the input they are expected to have”

    The thread between these criteria is the implication that doing a defined job to an agreed standard isn’t enough. Promotions, particularly to high grades, depend on creating new practices, integrating with other teams, and making an impact beyond the confines of a role. It is the things which aren’t in the job description, because the nature of innovation means they cannot be, that are as valuable as the actual job description.

    Innovation may be the goal but it comes at a cost.

    Consistency

    Every promotion criteria is a choice on what an institution values. The consistent message is that value is not purely about executing a single role consistently well. The choice that many universities have made is that there is value in working vertically, developing new practice within a role, and working horizontally, developing and sharing expertise across teams and departments.

    This choice means that there is less emphasis on maintenance and delivery. The slow grind of keeping the place running and doing a set of discreet things well over and over again.

    The result of this choice is that roles where there is less autonomy may be at a disadvantage. This is not to say there is not a role for innovation in all jobs but that innovation is structurally easier in some jobs than others. Take for example the jobs which are purely focussed on creating and interpreting new knowledge. In a previous role as a senior policy advisor I had great latitude to pursue institutional projects, look into problems and suggest new ways of working, and as a bonus my boss was the Vice Chancellor. It would have been an enormous failure of mine to have not been innovative.

    Conversely, the people our institutions rely on that work on the reception desks, maintain buildings, clean the offices, and do the things that actually make the entire place stay open clearly have less freedom to innovate in their work. They are managed on their ability to deliver a distinct service but promotion is often dependent on being able to move beyond maintaining performance. There therefore opens a gap in the possibility of getting promoted between those who work primarily in maintaining the institution and those who think about what the institution might do. This does not seem like an ideal incentive for institutions that rely on lots of people turning up, doing a defined role well, and being motivated to do so.

    Innovation for the sake of it

    The underpinning assumption is that innovation for its own sake is a good thing. There is even a league table for the most innovative universities in the world.

    This is because the university bureaucracy demands feeding with new ideas. It is a more machine. It needs more papers, more ideas, more meetings, more service innovation, more approaches, more evaluation, and ultimately more with less. The current more is innovating in service delivery with less resource to do it. It is rare to see a university with few ideas. It is much more common to see an institution with too few people to deliver them.

    The prizing of the new is tempting because it’s interesting but it’s a tool for a limited set of purposes. Innovation is the tool through which new ideas, services, processes, and products can emerge. Maintenance, the kind of reusing, fixing, and keeping things consistent, is the tool to ensure the good keeps going. They both have their place but one is not more inherently valuable than the other.

    In their influential essay on the topic Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel write that:

    Entire societies have come to talk about innovation as if it were an inherently desirable value, like love, fraternity, courage, beauty, dignity, or responsibility. Innovation-speak worships at the altar of change, but it rarely asks who benefits, to what end? A focus on maintenance provides opportunities to ask questions about what we really want out of technologies. What do we really care about? What kind of society do we want to live in? Will this help get us there?

    To believe entirely in innovation as an unalloyed good is to fundamentally believe that newness is better. It is by extension a surrender of agency to say the promise of the future is better than the material of the present. Once the innovation happens more maintenance is needed. Once innovation overtakes maintenance, leaving no capacity to keep the new thing working,  the realm of innovation for innovation sake is entered.

    However, the alternative is not to go entirely the other way and focus on consolidation. As Russell and Vinsel point out in their own country

    What a shame it would be if American society matured to the point where the shallowness of the innovation concept became clear, but the most prominent response was an equally superficial fascination with golf balls, refrigerators, and remote controls.

    It is a question of balance and in a multi-layered bureaucracy like a university it requires balance across numerous domains.

    At a human level, there should be clear progression pathways for people that want to be experts and keeping things going. The reward does not have to be management responsibility (why make people who are good at delivering do less delivery?) but recognition of their domain specialisms.

    Culturally, it is about language that reflects the shared contribution of skills toward a common goal. And institutionally, it is a question of how maintenance becomes a key strategy component, and is therefore recognised. For example, the extent to which sustainability strategies are built on innovative idea vs the extent to which they are about keeping the old going.

    Our institutions depend on the people that literally keep the lights on, the machines working, and the services delivered. Let’s let the maintainers maintain and reward them for doing so. Let’s also keep innovating, maybe just not on everything all of the time.

    Source link