The essential skills needed for the future workforce
Ensuring our education system is equipping future generations with the essential skills for tomorrow’s workforce
New technologies and major demographic and environmental changes are predicted to transform employment over the coming decades. Changes in the labour market pose opportunities and threats for those already in the labour market, and those about to enter it. These changes offer opportunities by moving capital and labour into more productive occupations, but also carry threats, particularly for workers in occupations that are projected to decline, and who lack the skills and qualifications to move into growing, higher skilled professional occupations which utilise these skills more intensively.
NFER’s five-year research programme, The Skills Imperative 2035, has identified the essential employment skills (EES) people will need for work in the future, and through the projection of supply and demand for these skills in the year 2035, is investigating how these skills could be developed through the education system and other mechanisms.
Based on our labour market projections, the identified six essential employment skills, are: collaboration; communication; creative thinking; information literacy; organising, planning and prioritising; and problem solving and decision making. These skills are already very important today but will be even more vital across the labour market in 2035.
The latest working paper in the Skills Imperative programme examines the relationship between children’s cognitive and behavioural development between birth and age 17 and factors related to their school and home backgrounds. The research finds that skills development is highly cumulative and, as children get older, inequalities in their cognitive and behavioural outcomes become more entrenched. It finds differences in children’s material, emotional and educational environments at home influence their starting points when they enter school and also their progress through every stage of primary and secondary education. Extra-curricular engagement is also positively associated with children’s behavioural and cognitive development between the ages of eight and 17, and it is well documented that children from disadvantaged backgrounds have less access to these opportunities. The paper concludes that addressing future skills gaps is likely to require a systematic approach that addresses the structural and behavioural influences on children’s development from the early years, both at home and at school.
Young people without the skills and qualifications to enter growing professional jobs, will have fewer opportunities to enter the labour market via low-skilled occupations, given few of these are projected to grow. This makes it harder to absorb these young people into the labour market, and so increases their risk of being outside of education, employment and training (NEET). Mitigating the effects of change on these groups should be as much of a priority for government, employers and the wider sector as seizing the benefits of growth in the number of professional jobs. This could be achieved by supporting more workers displaced from declining occupations to move into growing occupations, either before they fall out of work or in the immediate aftermath of being made unemployed. Additionally, ensuring more young people have the skills (particularly EES) and qualifications needed to enter growing occupations when they enter the labour market, will reduce skills inequalities.
NFER’s Skills Imperative 2035 research programme will conclude this year. For more information, please visit www.nfer.ac.uk
