National Foundation for Educational Research have released their important report looking at essential skills.
Learning and Work Institute is part of a new research project which will identify the essential employment skills people will need for work by 2035, funded by the Nuffield Foundation and led by National Foundation for Educational Research. The multi-disciplinary team will investigate how these skills can be developed through the education system and other mechanisms in order to inform longer-term planning for how to meet future demand for essential employment skills.
More details of this important research programme can be found here.
This first report, a literature review drawing on a wide-ranging and growing evidence base, sets the scene for our wider research study by bringing together what the evidence suggests about:
- What the world of work will look like in 2035?
- Which essential employment skills will be in demand and how do we prepare?
Key findings:
- Workers with low levels of education or in low-skilled/routine tasks continue to be at greatest risk from automation, particularly in areas such as production, manufacturing and administration. However, artificial intelligence will also impact higher skilled jobs.
- Human reasoning and interaction will be important in expected growth areas (such as health, social care and education) as well as in in areas more typically associated with the future, such as digital, technological and green industries.
- Urgent action is needed to ensure future skills supply and worker employability, given that around 1.5% of the manufacturing workforce in the EU has already been displaced by technology (Oxford Economics, 2019) and 22 per cent of current workforce activities across the EU could be automated by 2030 (Smit et al. 2020).
- The pandemic has accelerated the pace of digitisation, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) and exacerbated labour market inequalities, again underlining the need for action.
- Problem solving/decision making, critical thinking/analysis, communication, collaboration, creativity and innovation are transferable skills which will be in high demand in the next 15 years and beyond as technology becomes more embedded in the workforce.
Download the research here
And the briefing note here
