As business and society seeks to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic, work has changed forever with acceleration in trends such as automation and digital transformation. Those seeking to build careers or businesses will need to review their skills, adapt and retrain. That emerged from a discussion of figures in the fields of education and training, convened by the business body Resilience First, and the Foundation for Science and Technology, a charity.
With furlough schemes ending, government support being scaled back worldwide, and redundancies rising, the imperative for ‘skills resilience’ has never been higher for employees. Society too needs to invest in upskilling the workforce and government and the higher and further education sectors have a vital role to play, the webinar heard.
Robert Hall, pictured, Executive Director of Resilience First, said: “As we all struggle to manage the consequences of Covid-19, as well as the growing climate crisis and Brexit, the focus has rightly turned on how the country can prepare the workforce for the skills of tomorrow rather than relying on the skills of the past. Being resilient to change and agile in grabbing new opportunities will be important assets in the future employment market.
“A recent survey by the CBI and McKinsey revealed that nine in ten employees will need to learn new skills or retrain entirely during the next decade at a cost of £13 billion a year with 21 million needing to learn basic digital skills. Both employees and employers will need to work together, along with the government to shape the future world of work.”
Lord Willetts, a former Conservative Minister of State for Universities and Science, is Chairman of the Foundation for Science and Technology. He said: “It does look as if the virus is driving real structural change in the economy. The shift to online retail was already underway but has clearly been massively accelerated by the virus. We may see in manufacturing the challenge of operating facilities when the virus is around meaning a further impetus to automation.
“We cannot be fully confident in which sectors will grow or shrink in the UK economy over the years ahead. It is so hard to predict, which is why skills resilience will be so important. The prime minister gave quite a bold announcement on investment in skills including a lifetime skills guarantee only the other week.”
Ben Fletcher, Executive Director of Policy and Engagement at the trade body Make UK, said: “The UK remains one of the top ten global manufacturing nations, accounting for 12 per cent of the core UK economy and 50 per cent of all exports. But change in the manufacturing industry has been moving at a faster pace than the ability of our skills to keep up and we have a significant skills gap at the mid-technical level. We do anticipate significant redundancies in manufacturing post Covid-19 and many of those being laid off will be the older and more skilled workers.
“The value of engineering skills in a crisis has been clearly demonstrated in the last few months. This has generated a real interest from young people in engineering apprenticeships, but many small companies in particular will not have the cash post Covid-19 to invest in apprenticeships for the future and they need funding help from the government.”
And Lizzie Crowley, Senior Policy Adviser for Skills at CIPD, said: “Even before the Covid-19 crisis, the changing economy was placing greater emphasis on ‘human’ skills, but new labour market entrants and existing employees are struggling to demonstrate, and develop, these skills now. On top of this it is estimated that the average useful length of a digital skill is now only 18 months.”
“It is vital that we embed essential skills development across the whole of the education system to support better alignment of supply and demand. This means greater employer education partnerships to unlock opportunities for young people to develop these skills while in education. It also means increasing the adoption of workforce practices that allow employees develop these skills throughout their working lives.”
Event
Nicola O’Connor, Legal Director, at the law firm Bird and Bird, is chairing a Resilience First webinar on November 12 on economic crime. Visit https://www.resiliencefirst.org/events/tackling-economic-crime-covid-19-world. Speakers invited include from the National Economic Crime Centre; and the former senior counter-fraud policeman Chris Greany.
