Essential employment skills required by employers now are set to
become even more important in the future, according to a new report.
The report says that while many occupations will experience
greater demand for specialist knowledge and skills, it is
transferable skills such as collaboration, communication,
problem-solving and decision making that will be vital for
powering the economy and individual careers in 2035. This might
reflect, in part, the fact that transferrable skills such as
these, are harder to automate.
Demand for these essential employment skills is expected to grow
significantly between now and 2035 as they will be in even higher
demand across the labour market than they are already.
Furthermore, almost 90 per cent of the 2.2 million new jobs
that will be created in England between 2020 and 2035 will be
professional and associate professional occupations, such as
scientists and engineers. These roles will require higher levels
of proficiency in these essential employment skills.
Given the skills shortages
that currently exist across the country, these projections
suggest that the situation will get even worse in future without
action. It is therefore imperative that central government works
with local authorities, employers and educationalists to help the
workforce develop these skills in tandem with the knowledge
acquired in schools. A limited supply of these skills in the
future could hold back economic growth, increase friction in the
labour market and put some groups at significant risk of
unemployment, resulting in widening inequality.
The publication is the latest in a suite of papers under the
NFER-led Skills Imperative 2035:
Essential skills for tomorrow's workforce, a five-year
research programme funded by the Nuffield Foundation.
This latest analysis,
carried out by Sheffield University in collaboration with NFER,
identified the six skills expected to be most demanded by
employers in the next 15 years. They are:
- Collaboration
- Communication
- Creative thinking
- ‘Information literacy’ (skills related to gathering,
processing, and using information)
- Organising, planning and prioritising work
- Problem-solving and decision making
The country currently has over a million job vacancies, with many
business groups repeatedly warning that chronic labour shortages
in some sectors and occupations threaten England’s ambitions for
economic growth.
Jude Hillary, the programme’s Principal Investigator and NFER’s
Co-Head of UK Policy and Practice, said: “The demand for the top
six skills is projected to increase between 2020 and 2035. The
implication is clear; the future labour market will need a
greater supply of these skills than it has today.
“To meet these future demands we need an urgent government-led,
cross-sector approach to increase the development and
availability of these skills across the workforce. The Government
should support more workers to acquire the skills to ‘move up’
the occupational hierarchy and take action to ensure young people
have higher average levels of these skills than previous
generations.”
Dr Emily Tanner, Education Programme Head at the Nuffield
Foundation said: “This data-driven approach to identifying
changes in skills demand makes an important contribution to the
field and provides the robust evidence needed to shape skills
policy and practice.”
The report also projects that:
- Demand for the more than 150 skills outside of the top six
most used skills in 2035 is also changing. Around 70 per cent of
these skills are projected to increase in demand over the period
2020 to 2035. These include skills such as ‘Developing and
Building Teams,’ ‘Providing Consultation and Advice to Others,’
and ‘Developing Objectives and Strategies’.
- Thirty per cent of these skills will reduce in demand over
the next 12 years. These include physical and sensory skills,
which have, historically, primarily been used in the primary and
secondary sectors (i.e. agriculture, extractive industries,
manufacturing and construction). Demand for these types of skills
has been in decline over the last few decades as the economy has
increasingly become dominated by services. This trend is set to
continue.
- Changes in the composition of the labour market will also
drive increases in the demand for a wide range of specialist
skills by 2035. However, while demand for some specialist skills
has increased markedly, they still do not appear as highly in the
rank order of the most important skills across the labour market
in 2035.
In the next stage of the research programme, we aim to estimate
what the future supply of these essential employment skills will
be in 2035 and predict where skills gaps are likely to arise -
including identifying which groups are most at risk of lacking
the essential employment skills needed. We will consider what
actions are needed to support these groups to transition to other
opportunities, and move on to investigate how the education
system can support the development of the essential employment
skills needed in future.
