UK Commission’s Employer Perspectives Survey 2012
The UK Commission’s Employer Perspectives Survey 2012 provides a UK-wide picture of how employers are meeting their skills needs, looking both at their engagement with skills and employment services and their broader approaches to people development.
Evidence Report : UK Commission’s Employer Perspectives Survey 2012 (PDF, 2.5 Mb)
Executive Summary (PDF, 597 Kb)
Technical Report
(PDF, 724 Kb)
Published December 2012
The UK Commission’s Employer Perspectives Survey 2012 (UKCEPS 2012) gathered the views of 15,000 employers across the UK. The survey provides a UK-wide picture of how employers are meeting their skills needs, looking both at their engagement with skills and employment services and their broader approaches to people development.
In particular the survey examines: approaches to recruitment; awareness and use of skills support services/initiatives; engagement with external training providers; and the use of vocational qualifications and apprenticeships. The survey also covers specific areas of interest to the UK Commission, and in 2012 this includes questions on the use of work placements and the recruitment of young people.
The results provide a comprehensive and rich source of data for a range of users, and when teamed with the findings from the UK Commission’s other major employer survey (The UK Commission’s Employer Skills Survey), provides a definitive picture of the skills challenges faced by employers across the UK and what action they are taking to tackle them. This report presents the initial survey findings, and discusses differences by key factors such as nation, sector and size of establishment.
Key findings from the report include:
- There are perhaps unexpected signs of business confidence amongst private sector employers: almost half of establishments expect their business to grow in the coming year, and there is also greater confidence amongst younger businesses than older ones.
- Employers typically use a range of channels when they are looking to recruit. They tend to make most use of private recruitment services which they do not have to pay for. Indeed, the single most common channel employers used to find candidates to fill vacant posts was ‘word of mouth’.
- Candidates’ qualifications play a role in most employers’ recruitment processes and decisions, and a significant role for more than two in five. Academic qualifications continue to be better regarded than vocational qualifications.
- Whilst the majority of employers train and plan their training there is a significant core of employers that do not.
- Employers are more likely to provide training internally than to access the external workforce development market, although overall around half of employers do use external channels to deliver workforce development for their staff.
- Employers most commonly look to commercial providers (private sector training firms or third sector providers) when they are looking outside of their own organisation to deliver training.
- Overall take up of vocational qualifications remains at a steady level. However, there has been qualitative improvement in satisfaction with vocational qualifications amongst those employers that offer them.
- Only a minority of all UK establishments offer apprenticeships (15 per cent). However, almost a quarter of those who don’t currently offer Apprenticeships expect to in the coming 2-3 years.
- Employers are open to the recruitment of, or providing opportunities to, young people. Just over a quarter of all establishments, or 62% of those who had recruited, had recruited a young person in the previous 12 months. A quarter of all establishments had offered a placement to schools, college or university students.
You can download a copy of the questionnaire (DOCX, 104 Kb)
In addition, all of the 2012 Employer Perspectives Survey data files can be obtained via the UK data archive
