One of the central pillars of the Labour focus on skills and growth is that we need good information about what skills we need and where.
No need to check your calendars, I did go over this in a fair bit of detail a couple of weeks ago, but we’ve just had a new drop of relevant (and UK wide) data from the Office for National Statistics that puts a new slant on just how complicated this is going to be.
In essence, the issues are as follows: online adverts are only one source of information about skills demands (and may skew in various ways), for any meaningful collection of skills that could have a course or training developed to support it we are dealing (in most cases) with very low numbers, and information about skills needs from advertised roles is derived in an opaque (and apparently undocumented) ways.
Which skills?
We’re also into the depths of the difference between skills demand and skills planning.
The top layer of the ONS release is a new publication, Which skills are employers seeking in your area, underpinned by new experimental official statistics on online job advertisements (sourced from an outsourced Textkernel scrape of over 90,000 job boards and recruitment pages). It’s one of those interactive visualisations, allowing you to learn fascinating skills facts about your local area. The underlying data is released for reference as metrics with numerous geographic splits all the way down to lower tier local authority (LTLA) level, and also mashed up with annual population survey (APS) data on workforce skills – with the highest resolution there being ITL level 2.
If that last geographic area is a new one on you, the regions of the UK plus the devolved nation are at ITL1 (International territorial level), or pre-Brexit, the far more entertaining NUTS1 (Nomenclature des unités territoriales statistiques). ILT2/NUTS2 is the layer below that, generally and unhelpfully described as “counties and groups of counties”: large and useful looking chunks of the UK. Of course, the release isn’t completely ILT2 – it (perhaps unhelpfully) includes London as a single, massive area with loads of job adverts and skills.
Supply and demand
But we have a problem. Here’s a plot of occupational shortages for ILT2 regions, looking firstly at secondary education teaching professionals (SOC code 2313).
The colours on the map show the “Proportion of people who met the requirements for at least one occupation, who have the skills to work in at least one advertised job”. Honestly, I had to ask about what this one meant.
What ONS do to create this metric is to take (a) the number of people who match the skills for an occupation (a 100 per cent match in terms of skills, and the role is not their current main or second job) and divide that by (b) the number of people in the area who have the skills to work in at least one occupation other than their current one.
If we look at Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire there are (apparently) 435 people who fall into category a (have the skills to be a secondary teacher, do not currently teach) but a vastly larger number of people who have the skills to do any job other than their current one (b) – so of the potential workforce available across these three counties the proportion of potential secondary school teachers nets out to 0.0 per cent (I am promised an update to three decimal places in the next few days, but suffice it to say it is not a big proportion).
This feels odd to me. One thing I know about teachers is that some of them teach for a bit and then go off and do something less stressful and better paid – indeed, teacher attrition is a real problem. Imagine someone living in Buckinghamshire who used to work as a secondary school teacher – he holds teaching qualifications and has relevant experience, but currently has another job. Should the inclination take him I do not think he would struggle to find work as a history teacher in the three counties nearest to his locality.
This is likely to apply to a large number of residents. We are told that there were 670 advertised vacancies for secondary school teachers over this period – suggesting that even if everyone that could do the job binned off their current employment and started teaching the area would still be down 235 teachers. Of course, the UK has many former teachers. And you can scroll through any number of job roles to find similar examples: effectively nobody in Kent that was not a registered nurse practitioner in 2023 is deemed to have the skills to be a registered nurse practitioner.
Even if we leave aside the idea of area specific professional skills needs (“We need a pharmacist, but they must live in the East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire ILT2 area!” – “what about Sheffield?” – “Sorry, no good.”) I am honestly not sure what you are meant to be doing with this information as an employer or skills provider.
Job data stats
That’s not to dismiss the whole release, of course. We get a handy plot of the proportion of advertised jobs in 2023 where the population in each area had the skills to do the job.
This shows us that there are significant workforce skills shortages in Lincolnshire, north eastern Scotland and Cheshire: in Lincolnshire the existing workforce had the skills to do just 29.79 per cent of advertised jobs.
We can also see the degree of specialisation within the UK job market – the skills and the ability to meet the requirements of a given job can be found in around two per cent of the working age population, and this varies geographically.
There’s perhaps more of interest in the data concerned solely with online job adverts. Here’s a dashboard for job adverts by job role: the map shows August 2024 data (the most recent available) and you can see a time series going back to January 2017 if you mouse over an area of interest (or the London figure at the top for the whole of London).
Our issues here are comparatively simple ones – the places with more jobs have more job adverts than places that have less jobs. A large urban area (Manchester, Liverpool, even Norwich) is going to look like an area with a higher demand for any given job than rural areas. While we could use proportions of total jobs, in this case it would erase one of the purposes of the release: every job advert needs a person to fill it.
You can see peaks and troughs in the time series – and it may be tempting to link these to new employers entering the area, or to in-area demand increasing. However, ONS suggests caution in going too far with these interpretations: much of the validity is linked to the availability of job boards and advertisements over time. In May 2024 a large new source of adverts was brought in that increased both snapshot and new advert metrics, in January 2024, a large source of adverts was reinstated after not receiving new adverts from it for the second half of 2023, some advertisers (for example the Independent) have declined or discontinued during the time period. On it goes.
So what we are left with is a resource that is superficially interesting – it is undeniably fun to learn about the growing demand for secretarial skills in Cornwall or that Cheshire has a glut of education management professionals (and, seriously, hats off for a UK-wide resource) – but requires too many caveats to be useful in local skills planning or provider portfolio development. It may improve over time, but if we were hoping for a truly responsive skills sector it feels like there will be a wait.
