UK Commission’s Employer Skills Survey 2011: England Results
This report is the first of four nation reports presenting the results of the UK Commission’s Employer Skills Survey 2011 in detail for UK nations. Because the survey took place across the UK for the first time, we previously published a report for the entire UK. Our nation reports present information on a consistent basis with the legacy skills surveys in individual nations.
The UK Commission’s Employer Skills Survey: England Results (PDF, 1.8 Mb) Published July 2012
This report looks at results for England in detail; we break our results down by English region, industrial sector, occupation, and size of establishment. The results are presented to be comparable with the National Employer Skills Survey (NESS) series for England. In England, over 75,000 employers were interviewed on a wide range of issues including investment in training and staff development, vacancies and skills shortages, gaps in employees’ skills, and recruitment of education leavers.
The results provide a comprehensive source of data for users:
Employers can identify how they compare to their sector in their provision of training or own experience of skill deficiency and identify key challenges and opportunities for their sector;
Individuals and careers advisers can identify sectors and occupations experiencing particular shortages;
Providers of training and development can use the results to help shape provision to need in their locality or their specialist areas;
The size of the survey enables particularly detailed geographical analysis, for example, by Local Enterprise Partnership in England.
Findings from the report show that in England:
Although only a small minority of businesses reported vacancies unfilled because of skill shortages, nearly all business with a skills shortage (93%) found it had an impact on the operation of the business. The survey also finds concentrations of these skills shortages in particular industries and occupations (such as Skilled Trade occupations), concentrations which have been reported in previous English surveys;
Whilst the proportion of businesses with vacancies has risen since 2009, it has not risen to the levels observed in 2007. Overall, the proportion of all vacancies which are skill shortage vacancies has remained stable since 2009, but this masks variation by size, sector and region. For example, mid sized establishments (employing between 25 and 199 people) reported an increase in the proportion of vacancies which are skill-shortage, in contrast to larger or smaller establishments;
Over 1.3 million employees did not have the skills required to perform their job role. Looking back at previous surveys in England, there are persistent pockets of concentration of these skills gaps, to which training is often a response;
Just over a half of employees (53%) received training in the previous year, a slight decline on the 56% reported in 2009. As in previous years, training rates varied significantly between occupations, with 44% of those employed as managers receiving training compared to 70% of those employed in caring and leisure services
Around a third of businesses (30%) had recruited someone straight from education in the last 2-3 years. The majority of these were satisfied with the work-readiness of education leavers, with this satisfaction rising with the age of the education leaver
For more on training levels and patterns, see our first two infographic episodes on YouTube :
Episode 1
VIDEO
Insert End
Episode 2
VIDEO
