Employability: Incentivising Improvement
The UK’s route to growth and economic recovery depends on creating more businesses in high skill, high value added industries and having a workforce with the skills to support business ambition. Both the economy and society benefit from having more people in work and more people in productive work. And just as businesses need people who have the skills for today’s jobs and the capacity to adapt as needs change, individuals’ chances of surviving and thriving in a competitive and fast changing labour market are improved if they have the right skill-set. The right skill-set means a combination of technical and transferable skills usually referred to as ‘employability skills’. These cover a broad range of skills and attributes – from the fundamental skills of literacy, numeracy and ICT, to personal skills including self-management and communication, to having a positive attitude and the desire to succeed.
This report investigates how we incentivise the effective delivery of these employability skills by using some of the key levers at our disposal: practitioner training, assessment and funding and outlines the UK Commission’s recommendations for what needs to change. It builds on the UK Commission’s 2009 report ‘The Employability Challenge’ which offers providers good practice approaches to delivering employability skills. The report is wide in scope; employability skills themselves cover a broad range of skills and attributes and our investigation covers England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It also considers a range of settings – further education, higher education, 14-19 and provision to support people from welfare into work.
To help build an evidence base for this work we commissioned Deloitte to carry out three projects, one to support each of the three strands. Deloitte’s reports have informed our findings along with further evidence gathered from our own research and regular engagement with employers, learners and those in the education and training community.
Download the Deloitte Training report
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