ERIC Number: ED676549
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2024-Mar
Pages: 20
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: 978-1-916567-04-7
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: 0000-00-00
An Analysis of the Demand for Skills in the Labour Market in 2035 -- Revised Projections. Working Paper 3b
Andy Dickerson; Gennaro Rossi
National Foundation for Educational Research
In July 2022 the Office for National Statistics (ONS) announced that they had made errors coding occupational data in the Labour Force Survey (LFS) for 2021. These errors were subsequently corrected and the ONS published revised LFS data for 2021 in summer 2023. LFS data up to 2021 played a central role in the production of the Skills Imperative 2035 occupational employment projections. These occupational employment projections were then combined with estimated future occupational skills profiles to produce the assessment of the demand for skills in the labour market 2035 (Dickerson et al., 2023). Given the central role of 2021 LFS data in producing the employment and skills projections, NFER, the Nuffield Foundation and Warwick IER took the decision to produce a revised set of employment and skills. This Working Paper describes the implications of the New skills projections and compares them with the Old (i.e. original) ones. ONS originally expected that the correction would only affect a limited number of occupations, with just a modest impact on broader groups of occupations in the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC). However, this was not the case and corrected LFS data for 2021 had a more significant impact on estimates of the size of each occupation, including at the 1- and 2-digit levels of the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC), as well as at the more detailed 4-digit level. However, the impact on historical and projected future trends in employment is modest. Therefore, the overall effect of the errors on our employment projections is fairly minimal. However, the errors do affect the scale of change projected in each occupation's share of UK employment, and the degree to which the change in share differs between the new and old projections by occupational group. This Working Paper presents revised skills projections, which utilise the revised employment projections based on the corrected LFS data published by ONS for 2021. Overall, the ONS coding errors have a very modest effect on the rank order of the skills projected to be most intensively utilised across the labour market in 2035. The original conclusions about skills demand in 2035 as reported in Dickerson et al., (2023) are largely unchanged and justification for the selection of six 'essential employment skills' is thus largely unaffected by the LFS error and our analysis of skills requirements. The six 'essential employment skills' are: communication; collaboration; information literacy; problem solving and decision making; organising, planning and prioritising work; and creative thinking.
Descriptors: Labor Market, Job Skills, Demand Occupations, Futures (of Society), Supply and Demand, Skill Obsolescence, Employment, Labor Needs, Employment Potential, Foreign Countries
National Foundation for Educational Research. The Mere, Upton Park, Slough, Berkshire, SL1 2DQ, UK. Tel: +44-1753-574123; Fax: +44-1753-637280; e-mail: enquiries@nfer.ac.uk; Web site: http://www.nfer.ac.uk
Related Records: ED676410, ED676411, ED676412, ED676413, ED676414, ED676550, ED676553, ED676554, ED676547, ED676583, ED676567, ED676571, ED676572, ED676573, ED676582, ED676584, TD656221, ED619280
Publication Type: Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: Nuffield Foundation (United Kingdom)
Authoring Institution: National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) (United Kingdom); Cambridge Econometrics (United Kingdom); Kantar Public; Learning and Work Institute (United Kingdom); University of Roehampton, London (United Kingdom); University of Sheffield (United Kingdom); University of Warwick, Warwick Institute for Employment Research (IER)
Identifiers - Location: United Kingdom
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A


