Last year, as chancellor Rishi Sunak encouraged people from “all walks of life” to retrain in the wake of the coronavirus-induced recession, Vikki Stephenson took an online careers quiz to find out what job could be right for her. The government’s National Careers Service skills assessment quiz—a free online 50-question test that helps quiz takers find alternate professions—proved to be far from helpful. Participants reported receiving results that ranged from the extraordinary (bingo caller, colon hydrotherapist) to the absurd (becoming a ballerina in middle age). Several were also encouraged to take up jobs severely affected by lockdowns (airline pilot, cinema projectionist).
“It was bizarre,” Stephenson recalls; the quiz told her she should be a chef. She does not consider herself a particularly good cook and is not interested in becoming one. At 49, she had worked in advertising at the BBC for two decades and was considering a career change. Last summer, as the company announced plans to cut jobs to plug a £125m hole in its finances, she decided to take a voluntary redundancy.
“In the short term, I’ll probably freelance as a creative just because it’s what I know,” Stephenson says. In the long term, she hopes to do something with “more direct purpose,” perhaps around education. She has enrolled in courses provided by BECTU, a union for workers in the media and entertainment industries, to learn about freelancing and video editing programmes. “The way things are in terms of retirement,” she says, referring to the increasing retirement age, “I've got potentially another 20 years of work left. So if I'm not doing something that makes me happy and fulfilled, then that’s a waste of life really.”
Other workers are facing a much more difficult time; the fact that Covid-19 has widened the economic divide is no longer up for debate. A surging stock market and residential housing boom have made the wealthy wealthier, while millions of those newly unemployed or in precarious labour are struggling—a trend euphemistically labelled the “K-shaped recovery.”
Previously, a low-wage worker who lost her job could find a new one in another low-wage occupation—a waitress could move to retail, for instance. But that is increasingly unlikely. A report published in February by consulting firm McKinsey & Company estimates that, by 2030, nearly all job growth could occur in high-wage occupations, while the share of employment in low-wage occupations declines for the first time. Workers in disappearing jobs—which typically employ more people without qualifications, young people, women and ethnic minorities—will somehow need to shift to higher-wage jobs.
But whether or not workers can adapt will depend largely on the support and training available, something that the UK government has historically failed to provide. “What we really want to see is a strong focus on how we give people the skills to make those transitions,” says Neil Carberry, chief executive of the Recruitment & Employment Confederation.
The rising number of qualifications in Britain has not resulted in better job-matching. There is also the perennial problem of attitudes to vocational education in a country that prioritises A-levels and university degrees. Many vocational sectors face huge shortages, while others employ people with qualifications beyond those required to do their job (who nevertheless carry huge debts from the cost of those very unnecessary qualifications). Carberry blames regular new reforms that distract from planning a true long-term approach, which would more effectively match supply and demand in the labour market. The 2017 apprenticeship levy, for example—which makes employers set money aside for training—actually led to a fall in the number of apprenticeships going to young people. “There is an accusation that some of the higher apprenticeships are just hiring people who would have been hired on graduate schemes anyway,” Carberry tells me.
Policy failure to tackle these issues was best summarised by the former permanent secretary to the Treasury, Nick Macpherson, speaking at the House of Lords in December: “In the last 100 years, every government has noted that the skills system in this country is hopeless. They claim that they will do a radical reform of it. They rearrange the deckchairs, and skills remain precisely the same problem as they have always been. If the government were to do anything in this period, creating a skills system that really makes a difference would be truly revolutionary. Sadly, I am not holding my breath.”
The pandemic has also sparked a discussion on what society considers a “skill.” Cleaners, warehouse workers, health aides and others who have taken on the burden of keeping society functional during lockdowns clearly have expertise and competence, despite their status as “low-skilled” or even “unskilled.” According to the McKinsey report, so-called “social and emotional skills,” in other words caring for others, is and will be in high demand so long as robots are simply not a good enough replacement for them. “The qualifications system doesn’t acknowledge these skills, the labour market doesn’t reward people for those skills, there’s often no career paths,” says Sally Wright, a senior research fellow at the Warwick Institute of Employment Research.
There are no straightforward answers for policymakers looking to fix the skills system. But besides leaving people to navigate online quizzes and overwhelmed job centres, the government will need to develop ambitious, large-scale retraining schemes to address the high levels of unemployment that we are likely to be facing. Training initiatives will continue to be useless if they lead to jobs that keep people underpaid, overworked and unable to make ends meet. Beyond providing education, experts say, any efforts to help people re-enter work should focus on linking training opportunities to actually existing jobs. As Carberry puts it: “It's not about completing the course, but about what the course leads to.”
