White Paper

This report contributes to the UK Commission’s work to transform the UK’s approach to investing in the skills of people as an intrinsic part of securing jobs and growth. It outlines the performance challenges faced in the Health and Social Care sector, the ‘real-life’ skills solutions implemented by leading and successful businesses to overcome them, and the benefits from doing so. The sector comprises two subsectors; health care and social care. Health care encompasses all hospital activities, medical nursing homes, GP services, specialist medical and dental practices and other human health activities. The social care sector includes residential nursing care, residential nursing facilities, residential care facilities (e.g. for the elderly, children or those with mental health care needs), child day care and non-residential social care.

One of the most fundamental obligations of any society is to prepare its adolescents and young adults to lead productive and prosperous lives as adults. This means preparing all young people with a solid enough foundation of literacy, numeracy, and thinking skills for responsible citizenship, career development, and lifelong learning. For over a century, the United States led the world in equipping its young people with the education they would need to succeed. By the middle of the 19th century, as Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz write in their book, The Race between Education and Technology, “the U.S. already had the most educated youth in the world.” At the turn of the 20th century, just as Europe was catching up, the rapid spread of the “high school movement” helped the U.S. vault ahead again. Yet as we end the first decade of the 21st century, there are profoundly troubling signs that the U.S. is now failing to meet its obligation to prepare millions of young adults. In an era in which education has never been more important to economic success, the U.S. has fallen behind many other nations in educational attainment and achievement. Within the U.S. economy, there is also growing evidence of a “skills gap” in which many young adults lack the skills and work ethic needed for many jobs that pay a middle-class wage. Simultaneously, there has been a dramatic decline in the ability of adolescents and young adults to find work. Indeed, the percentage of teens and young adults who have jobs is now at the lowest level since World War II.

The skills mismatch is multi-faceted. We are confronted by a supply-demand mismatch driven in part by the decisions of students to pursue qualifications in fields with limited employment opportunities.5 This trend is challenging as it results in an increase in the number of highly educated persons working in positions for which they are overqualified. There is also a domino effect whereby lesser qualified people are essentially edged out of the labour market.6 In addition to the supply-demand mismatch, employers also emphasize that competencies such as communication, emotional intelligence, creativity, design, interpersonal skills, entrepreneurship, technological skills and organizational awareness are key indicators to the success of job candidates and employees.7 The deficit of these skills is often cited by employers as an obstacle in the recruitment process.

This guide represents a new tool for skills needs anticipation based on the best international practices and foresight approaches. The current methodology is based on the results of the international workshop "Using technology foresights for identifying future skills needs" held in July 2013, which united foresight experts from all over the world. This guidance tool was prepared to steer experts and practitioners in defining future technological change and related changes in work organisation, job tasks and skills needs.

It is not possible to predict the future. 20 years ago, there was widespread belief among commentators that the defining feature of the future UK labour market would be radically reduced working hours and increased leisure time. Fast forward to 2014, the year in which mobile is set to overtake desktop to access the internet, and work and leisure hours have become blurred by our increasingly ‘mobile’ lives (The Economist, 2012). Jobs are being done on the move, at any time of day, in almost any location. This example highlights the difficulties involved in forecasting change. Yet, the way we think about tomorrow influences what we do today. We do not have definitive answers about what is around the corner, but we can try to systematically make sense of the direction of travel in the labour market and assess the key uncertainties that we know exist. By analysing developments in the UK labour market now, we can start to position ourselves for the work needs and opportunities of the future. As we see welcome signs of a strengthening UK economy, it is an opportune time to take a detailed look at the medium to long-term prospects for the world of work. At the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, our mission is to transform approaches to skills investment to drive enterprise, jobs and growth. This report presents the results of The Future of Work study which looks ahead to the labour market of 2030. It analyses stable trends that are already shaping the future of UK jobs and skills and forecasts the most likely disruptions to those trends. It then plots four anticipated scenarios of what the UK’s work landscape might look like in 2030, and importantly, the skills that will be required under these conditions. The purpose of this report is to trigger debate about investment in skills and inform the decisions facing employers, individuals, policy makers and education providers. At a time when economic optimism is building, we can do more than merely react to developments – we can proactively work towards a positive outcome. Our aim is not to predict a specific future, rather to influence and challenge thinking in a constructive, creative way.

This report was commissioned in response to research evidence showing a positive association between high performance working (HPW) and both skills utilisation and performance at an organisational level. The UK Commission’s previous work on HPW shows that the prevalence of HPW is both low and static in the UK, and the present study is part of a systematic attempt to uncover the means by which broader application of HPW might be encouraged in the UK. Specifically, in order to learn from experience internationally, the research sought to (1) develop understanding of how HPW is interpreted in different national contexts; (2) identify the different methods utilised to encourage and support up-take of HPW; and (3) utilise the understanding of conditions that give rise to HPW being prevalent in some national contexts as a basis for policy learning for the UK.

Governments have come to recognize that income inequality hinders economic growth. How policymakers will support inclusive growth remains to be seen.

A Practical Guide for Work-integrated Learning: Effective Practices to Enhance the Educational Quality of Structured Work Experiences Offered through Colleges and Universities focuses on structured work-integrated learning experiences such as internships, placements, co-ops, field experiences, professional practice and clinical practicums. The comprehensive guide is divided into seven chapters with an introduction to experiential learning theory, followed by background information and suggestions on improving the quality of WIL programs, program evaluation and recommendations for broader curricular integration developing meaningful partnerships with industry, government and community organizations.