Employer Voice
The ’employer voice’ has an important role to play in shaping the employment and skills system by articulating what they need, advising how these needs can best be met and identifying market or system failures.
It is widely accepted that we need to create a demand-led employment and skills system where employers are empowered to shape the system through their purchasing choices: ‘employer choice’.
However, ‘employer voice’ still has an important role to play. Employers use many different channels (Boards, Partnerships, Membership Organisations, etc). to feed in their views. They shape the system by articulating what they need, advising how these needs can best be met and identifying market or system failures. In doing so these employers make a significant contribution to business competitiveness, economic development and to enabling individuals to find and progress in work.
This project aimed to maximise the impact of employer influence on the employment and skills system. We undertook a variety of research to understand, within the current system, where the employer voice is effective, what can prevent the employer voice from having impact and ultimately how employer leadership of the employment and skills system can be improved. The project resulted in recommendations to governments, presented in a final report.
Employer Voice final report – What’s the deal? The employer voice in the employment and skills system (PDF, 809 Kb)
The report paper assessed current arrangements for capturing employer views and discussed how problems such as mismatched expectations between employers and government, overly complex structures, constant flux in the system and lack of impact might be addressed. This was examined by looking at the role that employers are being asked to play, the roles and responsibilities of different structures and the relationships between them. There was also an assessment of the impact that current arrangements are able to have and what affects this.
The proposed solutions aimed to create fewer and more effective employer voice structures, a simpler, more transparent system, better use of employers input and achieve greater overall impact.
A number of evidence reports were also produced:
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Employer Voice Policy Review (PDF, 327 Kb) – an overview of relevant policy for the last decade. It illustrated that ‘employer voice’ has remained consistently important, but that the terminology and detail has frequently changed.
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Employer Voice Literature Review (PDF, 362 Kb) – an overview of the main themes from 50 documents that provide a perspective on the employer voice (employer leadership, employer engagement and also demand-led were used to refine the search).
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Case Studies: Employer influence at different spatial levels
Three ‘place based’ case studies were undertaken to provide a snapshot of the range of employer voice structures operating in a particular place and examine the relationships between them.
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Employer Workshop Report (PDF, 127 Kb) – to build on the one-to-one interviews with employers undertaken across the UK a workshop was conducted with 25 employers currently involved in different kinds of employer voice structures.
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Impact Review of employer-led groups in England (PDF, 329 Kb) – 65 spatial employer voice structures were surveyed/interviewed to understand more about the kinds of impact that employer-led groups are able to evidence.
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Nations reports– a separate report was produced for Northern Ireland and Scotland to examine the extent to which the themes emerging from UK wide research applied in individual nations.
Northern Ireland Report (PDF, 341 Kb)
Scotland Report (PDF, 409 Kb)
