Research from the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), including data insights from Higher Educational Institutes (HEIs), examines the employability of recent graduates from an employer perspective.

The research was conducted between December 2020 and August 2021 and explores changes to employability skills within the context of the pandemic; how employers can help shape employability programmes in HEIs; and the optimal shape of employability programmes that could be offered by HEIs in future.

As employers’ expectations have changed post-pandemic and students face an increasingly challenging job market, the research will help HEIs to develop the courses and student offering that a new generation of learners now need for a hybrid world of work.

The research found that: –

• Many employers still believe that graduates lack the ‘basic’ work-ready competencies that make up employability skills.
• This skills gap will become more apparent in a hybrid / digital world.
• Embedding these skills from the very start of a university course will help students to identify and sell these skills to prospective employers.
• Once a graduate secures a role, the core skills of critical thinking, team-working and communication will be needed. This applies to all students as every graduate needs these skills to navigate the jobs market.
• More needs to be done to connect students with employers.  There is a disconnect that deters many employers from getting involved with HEIs to help shape the employability skills of students prior to graduation.
• 61% of employers who are not currently involved in shaping employability skills with HEIs would like to get involved, but only 11% of this group know how to do so.

The full CMI report can be accessed via this link.

The UK Government recently published its White Paper on Levelling up.  The paper sets out the next stages of the programme in the long-term, that is based on evidence, to demonstrate that a mix of factors is needed to transform places and boost local growth.  The aim is to: –

A. Boost productivity, pay, jobs and living standards by growing the private sector, especially in those places where they are lagging;
B. Spread opportunities and improve public services, especially in those places where they are weakest;
C. Restore a sense of community, local pride and belonging, especially in those places where they have been lost; and
D. Empower local leaders and communities, especially in those places lacking local agency.

The drivers for Levelling up can be achieved through 6 capital drivers, namely: –

• Physical capital – infrastructure, machines and housing.
• Human capital – the skills, health and experience of the workforce.
• Intangible capital – innovation, ideas and patents.
• Financial capital – resources supporting the financing of companies.
• Social capital – the strength of communities, relationships and trust.

Levelling up will also be about systems change which will reverse embedded historical trends.  This will include setting out clear ambitions, moving 22,000 Civil Servants out of London by 2030, empowering decision-makers in local areas, transforming the approach to data and evaluation to improve local decision-making, establishing a statutory duty to publish an annual report analysing progress and the creation of a new external Levelling Up Advisory Council.  The UK Government is also committed to facilitating collaboration and engagement with the devolved governments and stakeholders in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to ensure that Levelling up really is for the whole of the United Kingdom.

Levelling up is not about making every part of the UK the same or pitting one part of the country against another. Nor does it mean dampening down the success of more prosperous areas.  It’s about extending opportunity across the UK to relieve pressures on public services and housing, plus improving well-being and productivity in the North, Midlands and other parts of the UK.

A link to the Levelling up Executive Summary can be found here.

The full White Paper can be accessed via this link: Levelling Up the United Kingdom White Paper.

Employee wellbeing has been thrust to the forefront in the last two years in a way that has never happened before.  A report from Champion Health has brought together their employee wellbeing statistics, collected anonymously over the past 12 months, into one overall report.

The report found that employee mental health continues to be tested in new and challenging ways, with both employees and HR having to navigate their way through an unpredictable and fast-changing world.

The effects of this are clear.  Across the board, employees experiencing symptoms of anxiety and depression remain high, with nearly 60% of employees feeling anxious and just over half feeling low in mood. These figures are similar to those published in Champion’s previous data release in January 2021.

And whilst most employees didn’t report a current mental health diagnosis, nearly 1 in 4 met the criteria for ‘clinically relevant symptoms’ of anxiety and depression, suggesting they would benefit from further assessment and support from a qualified mental health professional.

Despite the best efforts of organisations, the data suggests that many employees are still struggling.  Whilst this might not be solely due to factors at work, the effects are certainly felt in the workplace.  Poor mental health is cited as a factor that impacts productivity for 1 in 5 employees, contributing to costly levels of presenteeism, on both a personal and business level.

Key findings were: –

• Tiredness is a significant barrier to productivity. Over half of employees surveyed feel fatigued, with the most common health issue impacting productivity being tiredness.
• Younger employees are struggling. Employees between the ages of 25-34 are being disproportionately affected by anxiety, depression and financial pressure.
• Male employees are still reluctant to seek help. Female employees are three times more likely to seek mental health support than male employees.
• Poor MSK health is a rising problem. More than half of employees are currently experiencing MSK pain, with the majority being either home or hybrid workers.
• Employees are motivated to make a change. 94% of employees are motivated to make a change to their wellbeing, with energy levels being the most common area of focus.

To see the full report from Champion Health click here.

In 2013, Business in the Community (BITC) launched the ‘Ban the Box’ campaign to redress the balance in the number of employers who were reluctant to consider the idea of opening their talent pool to people with criminal convictions.  A report published in 2021 examines the benefits.

When the campaign was started 75% of employers surveyed stated that they would discriminate against a candidate with a criminal conviction.  BITC therefore focused on getting employers to remove the criminal convictions tick box from applications to overcome objections.  However, from an employer perspective most believed that to do this would increase risk for their business, make their recruitment process more complicated, or require extra capacity to support people with convictions.

The campaign now covers more than one million jobs, thanks to a growing movement of employers who have committed to Ban the Box and adopt a fair approach to the recruitment of people with convictions.  More people with criminal convictions are able compete for jobs based on their skills and experience rather than being excluded for a past mistake.

Ban the Box has been adopted by organisations of all sizes and sectors in the UK – including large national businesses, charities and community organisations, regulated industries, and the public sector. It allows businesses to benefit from a diverse, untapped talent pool, while also bringing down the £18.1 billion annual cost of reoffending for businesses, taxpayers, and communities.

The impact of Ban the Box campaign can be seen in the BITC research survey with over 40 employers. The insights gathered in the report demonstrate the benefits of becoming a Ban the Box employer.  Regardless of the size or industry sector, organisations involved can open up their talent pool to the 11.7 million people with criminal convictions which demonstrates social value.

The Outcome

Banning the criminal conviction tick box enables people with convictions to enter the workplace or progress their careers.  Often this can lead to employers taking further steps to support people with convictions through partnerships which benefits all of society.  Given that in 2022, a lot of sectors and employers are now struggling to fill their vacancies, this is a recruitment option that merits consideration.

To read the full report click here.

The quarterly Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) Labour Market Outlook report provides an insight of future changes to the labour market around recruitment, redundancy and pay intentions. The findings are based on a survey of more than 1,000 employers.

The research found that demand for staff is high, as evidenced through the record number of vacancies and the forward-looking indicators on recruitment intentions in the report. By contrast, the supply of candidates is severely restricted for several reasons.

First, the unemployment rate is low, meaning fewer people are available and looking for work. Second, there are simply fewer people in the labour market than before the pandemic. This is partly due to immigrants who returned to their home countries, but much of it is the early exit from the labour market by older workers. A third reason is that employers are trying their hardest not to lose staff. The official redundancy rate is at a record low, and forward-looking redundancy intentions are below pre-pandemic levels. Retention is therefore seen as being as critical as recruitment is in enabling organisations to manage their workforce.

The report provides new insights into what employers are doing to boost recruitment and retention. Employers are responding with the most obvious strategy of raising wages by about 3%, which they are doing for both new hires and the existing workforce.  However, with the Bank of England forecasting inflation to reach an eye-watering 7.25% in April 2022, this means that most people will be looking at a real-terms pay cut in 2022, as while pay awards will be big, inflation is expected to be bigger, even before pressures on supply chains caused by the conflict in Ukraine are factored in.

Key findings were: –

• Employers have responded to recruitment challenges by raising pay (48%), advertising more jobs as flexible (46%) and upskilling existing staff (44%).
• Almost half of employers (46%) have hard-to-fill vacancies. These are most common in healthcare (64%), public administration and other public sector (52%), and construction (51%).
• Very few employers (6%) plan to decrease staff levels over the next quarter. The proportion planning redundancies stands at 11%, compared with 10% last quarter and 16% before the pandemic.
• Employers expect median basic pay awards to be 3%, the highest recorded for nearly a decade in research carried out by the CIPD.

To see the full CIPD report click here.

 

People Management has commented on a recent report by the Resolution Foundation that says that new immigration regulations are unlikely to have any major impact on the UK economy.

As firms in the UK are predicted to face significant hiring challenges throughout 2022, this matters as some industries will struggle to recruit and are likely to face “significant change”.  This follows the introduction of a points-based immigration system last year, which the Resolution Foundation feel will do little to change the UK’s “low investment, low productivity challenges”.

The report goes on to say that the new points-based scheme was unlikely to have a detrimental impact on businesses and will only cause a “pinch” among sectors which are reliant on workers who are now ineligible to come to the UK for work under the new rules.  This particularly applies to lower paying industries which may mean that they start to shrink.

Overall, the impact of the new migration regime will be small, but the claim that controlled migration was the key to a “new high wage economic strategy” has been “overdone”.

Some people therefore believe the organisations who wish to recruit and employ migrant workers will have to quickly overhaul their hiring practices and HR systems, as well as carrying out internal audits of existing employees to ensure they are compliant with the current migration rules.

To read the People Management article please click here. The full Resolution Foundation report can be found here.

The House of Commons Library has recently published a report on Youth Unemployment commenting on the impact of Covid-19 on the employment market and the current position today.

In the months following the start of the pandemic there was a large fall in employment levels for young people aged 16-24, and a large rise in the number of economic inactive young people. This was followed by a smaller rise in unemployment.

Unemployment levels are now below pre-pandemic levels, but the number of young people in employment remains below the previous level, while the number who are economically inactive (21.2%) is also above the level that it was 2 years ago.

Comparing the latest quarter, October-December 2021, with the pre-pandemic quarter of January-March 2020 shows that:

• The number of young people in employment has fallen by 103,000, a 3% fall. The fall for men has been larger, with employment levels falling by 4% for men and by 1% for women.
• The number of unemployed young people was below pre-pandemic levels by 67,000, a 13% fall. In July-September 2020 it had increased by 14% from pre-pandemic levels, but since then levels of unemployment for young people have steadily been falling.
• The unemployment rate is 11.2% compared to a pre-pandemic rate of 12.3%. This increased to 14.8% in July-September 2020. This is down from 11.7% in the previous quarter and down from 14.7% a year before.
• 93,000 people aged 16-24 had been unemployed for over 12 months in October-December 2021, which was 20.1% of unemployed 16-24 year olds. This is up from 17.6% in the previous quarter. However, 22% of all people who had been unemployed for over 12 months were 16-24 year olds.
• 82,000 more young people have become economically inactive, an increase of 3%. At the end of the furlough scheme (30 September 2021) 98,900 jobs held by those aged 24 or under were on furlough, which was 3% of eligible jobs.

The number of people aged 18-24 claiming unemployment related benefits more than doubled from March to May 2020 at the start of the pandemic. Since then, the youth claimant count has fallen, but the number of claimants for this age group in January 2022 was still 64,700 higher than in March 2020, an increase of 28%.

To read the full report click here.

According to the Resolution Foundation, although young people were disproportionately likely to lose their jobs at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, their employment prospects began to improve from spring 2021.

In reality, the youth unemployment crisis feared by many at the start of the pandemic did not transpire and by early autumn 2021, the 18-24-year-old unemployment rate was lower than it had been just before the pandemic. This success was in part due to the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (furlough), which protected jobs throughout the pandemic, and to young people’s swift re-entry to work after social-distancing restrictions eased.

Moreover, many young people were able to ‘ride out’ the economic impacts of the pandemic by entering education: the proportion of young people aged 18-24 in full-time education increased by 3% from the pre-pandemic period, to 35% (an increase of 119,000).

Overall, the Resolution Foundation found that one-in-three 18-24-year-old respondents (and nearly one-in-four surveyed 18-34-year-olds overall) who had been in work on the eve of Covid-19 experienced extended periods of worklessness during the pandemic, which can scar their employment and pay prospects in the longer term. Secondly, one-third of younger respondents who had fallen out of work during the winter 2021 lockdown have since returned to work on insecure contracts. Thirdly, despite the fact that unemployment hasn’t risen among young people over recent quarters, the share of 18-24-year-olds who are economically inactive and not in full-time study has grown slightly since spring last year, especially among men. And finally, all of these changes are associated with higher-than-average mental health risks.

Although there is much to celebrate in relation to the labour market for younger people, policy makers and employers face challenges on two fronts: –

1) Ensuring that employment support services help younger people who’ve experienced worklessness to avoid longer-term employment and mental health scarring;

2) Making sure that all younger people – be they entering work for the first time or in need of a new job – have access to good quality work that will help them develop and progress over their working lives.

Some groups of young people have been more likely than others to experience significant amounts of worklessness throughout the course of the pandemic young people aged 18-24 were the age group most likely to have experienced extended worklessness (having been unemployed, fully furloughed or self-employed without work for three months or more) over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. Previous Resolution Foundation research found that 33% of 18-24-year-olds who were in work in February 2020 experienced extended worklessness, compared to 21% of all working-age adults, and the impact on younger people has been unequal.

Additionally, their were  differences by education level, with 30% of surveyed non-graduates aged 18-34 who were in work before the pandemic having experienced extended worklessness, compared to 19% of their graduate counterparts., while 28% of younger people from a Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) backgrounds who were in work before the pandemic experienced extended worklessness, compared to 22% of their White counterparts.

To read the full Resolution Foundation research please click here.

Higher education is often seen as a crucial vehicle for improving intergenerational mobility. Previous research in the UK has generally looked in isolation at access to, or outcomes from, university for students coming from low-income backgrounds. In a recent report, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) puts these components together to investigate the extent to which individual universities, subjects and courses (the term used for specific subjects at specific universities, e.g. mathematics at the University of Warwick) promote intergenerational mobility.

The IFS report makes use of the Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) dataset to document mobility rates for each university, subject and course in England. Mobility rates are calculated via the following simple relationship:

Mobility rate =  Access  rate * Success rate.

Here the access rate is defined as the share of students for each university, subject or course who are from low-income backgrounds using the proxy of free school meal (FSM) eligibility, while the success rate is the share of those FSM students who make it to the top 20% of the earnings distribution at age 30.  As this latter measure requires people to have already turned 30, the focus of the main analysis is on people who attended university in the mid 2,000’s.

The main findings of the research show that: –

• Gaps in access are hugely variable depending on university selectivity. While low-income students are as likely to attend the least selective institutions as their wealthier peers, they are far less likely to attend the top universities.
• There is also a lot of variation in access to different subjects. Pharmacology and social care have only very small gaps in access by socio-economic background, but there are large gaps in subjects such as medicine.
• The very best-performing institutions in terms of their labour market success admitted few FSM students. Similarly, the universities with the highest FSM access rates have below average success rates.
• The average mobility rate across all universities is 1.3%. This means that at age 30, only 1.3 in every 100 university graduates are in the top 20% of the earnings distribution and from a low-income background, compared to a benchmark of 4.4.
• There is considerable variation around this average mobility rate. The highest-mobility institutions are often less selective and based in big cities, with London institutions especially dominant.
• The high share of FSM pupils in London, many of whom perform well at school and are from ethnic minority backgrounds.
• Many Russell Group universities have high success rates but admit very few FSM students, leading to below-average mobility rates.
• Adjusting earnings for cost of living differences across the country improves the mobility rates of Northern universities and lowers those in London and the South East.
• Law, computing and (especially) pharmacology are the best-performing subject areas, with mobility rates of 2.2%, 2.9% and 4.2%, respectively.
• While some courses have no students from low-income backgrounds, others have mobility rates that exceed 10%. Computing, law and economics at London-based institutions dominate the top 20 courses when ranked on mobility rates. Arts and humanities courses generally do poorly.
• There has been a slow but steady increase in the access rates of FSM students in the decade since older cohorts entered university in the mid 2,000’s. This period encompasses large higher education reforms that occurred in 2012.

Based on access rates, the IFS predict an increase in average mobility rates from 1.3% for cohorts at university during the mid 2,000’s to around 1.6% for cohorts entering university in 2018 and 2019. This demonstrates that much progress is still to be made, especially by the most selective universities, where access rates remain extremely low.

The full IFS report can also be accessed here.

 

Demos have published some research which looks at the experiences of people working at home since the arrival of Covid-19.

The shift to homeworking has been one of the most dramatic changes caused by the pandemic. Just a quarter of workers reported ever working from home in 2019, but as of September 2021, just over half of all workers across Britain were doing at least some work from home.

Much of the media coverage of the rise of homeworking has focused on the economic impacts of homeworking on public transport, shops and cafes which rely on commuters, as well as considering the implications for the government’s levelling up agenda.  In contrast, the experiences of low-paid workers, who have less financial resources to adapt to new working patterns, seem to have been overlooked as it is often assumed that working from home is only something for the ‘middle classes’, yet there also are many low-paid workers also doing this.

The Demos research looks at the experiences of these low-paid workers. A summary of the findings is shown below:

• Homeworkers are particularly positive about the impact homeworking has had on their productivity, work-life balance, flexibility at work, relationships with their families, caring responsibilities and their health and wellbeing.
• Low earners (those earning less than £20,000 per year) are generally just as positive as high earners about working from home.
• 74% of all homeworkers and 75% of low-paid homeworkers say that homeworking is good for their productivity.
• 73% of all homeworkers and 69% of low-paid homeworkers say that working from home is good for their work-life balance.
• 72% of all homeworkers and 68% of low-paid homeworkers say that working from home is good for their relationships with their family.
• Nearly all homeworkers (94%) would prefer to work from home at least some of the time in the future, with the same proportion (94%) of low-paid homeworkers agreeing.

While the shift towards homeworking is generally perceived as positive, there are challenges to be addressed too. The financial implications of homeworking for low paid workers vary significantly as while some report saving money, others have spent more as a result of working from home.

• People who always work from home report saving money, regardless of income. Low-paid workers who always work from home report saving about £22 per month due to homeworking.
• However, nearly half (46%) of low-paid hybrid workers report their costs increasing as a result of working from home. On average they report spending £39 more per month due to working from home.
• Among homeworkers, higher spending on gas and electricity (60%), food (35%), broadband (19%) and equipment (18%) are the most common costs associated with homeworking.

While homeworking is equally popular across income groups, low-paid workers are less likely to work from home. While only 37% of low paid workers report working from home at least some of the time, 73% of high-paid workers (defined as earning a personal income of £50,000 per year or more) also reported working from home some of the time.

The report goes on to recommend that the government should make employee contracts flexible by default, with the burden of proof lying on employers to demonstrate why a specified location is required in their particular circumstances. It also recommends that further research should be conducted to explore the sectors and occupations in which low-paid workers are employed, which of these currently offer homeworking, and which could offer homeworking in the future.

The full Demos report can also be accessed here.