What skills do employers want?

Stephen Uden, Head of Skills and Economic Affairs at Microsoft

This observation came from a red-faced employer I once met in Sunderland who clearly had a perspective on the skills needed for the 21st century workforce that had hitherto eluded me. I’ve met employers who are looking for people who are more technical, less technical; have strong basic skills or strong higher skills; are well polished individuals ready to work or who provide great raw material to be trained. In short, we employers are very diverse and we are looking for very different things from our workforce in terms of skills.

Creating value

The one thing that all employers agree on though is that we need skills that create value for our businesses and for the economy as a whole. It is worth remembering that there are other benefits of education, but surely we pretty much all agree that the creation of economically valuable skills is a vitally important outcome.

Businesses are well-placed to assess which skills are the most important to them economically. Indeed UK plc collectively spends £33 billion a year on training, precisely because of that belief that training will bring them economic returns.

Changing needs

The challenge is how to connect the diverse and often rapidly changing needs of business with the provision of training. Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) are one key vehicle for doing this by bringing together employers in a particular sector to produce a consensus on training needs for that sector. In the IT industry we are fortunate enough to have e-skills UK, which has had some notable success in addressing sectoral issues, such as with Computer Clubs for Girls, which seeks to encourage more women into the industry. However, not all SSCs have been able to make such an impact or to get an effective employer consensus.

Engaging small businesses

A bigger issue is the engagement of small businesses who represent an important element of the economy and yet who are not easy to reach and can’t always spend the time to articulate their needs. Microsoft depends on a network of 15,000 small partner companies in the UK, which means we have a vested interest in representing their views. As many small companies are part of the supply chain of larger ones, this approach is an underused mechanism to engage with the small business sector.


Despite the diversity of businesses, there are some common themes that seem to emerge time and time again.

• Many employers and employees are resistant to learning outside the workplace either because they fear a drop in productivity or because of negative attitudes towards formal education. It may never be possible to provide all new skills training in the workplace, but the greater provision of distance learning by providers could significantly improve the attractiveness of their training offer.
• It is not just about shiny shoes, but employers remain concerned about the level of some basic employability skills within their recruits. This was borne out by a recent CBI survey which revealed that only half of employers felt that newly qualified employees had sufficient levels of literacy and numeracy (happily for us, the figure for IT skills was much higher at 92 per cent). In a recent study conducted by Microsoft, we found that the top employability skills were team-working, interpersonal skills, initiative and problem solving. There are never going to be specific qualifications for these skills, but it should surely be possible to build these into programmes of learning as some institutions, notably John Moores University, are starting to do.
• People, especially in Government, tend to focus on qualifications, but it is really skills that bring economic advantage; qualifications are just ways of measuring transferable skills. Employers have concerns about the value of many supply-led qualifications, but have far more confidence in the value of those that they have had a hand in creating. We are seeing an explosion in the number of employer-led qualifications, such as Foundation Degrees, which give a real opportunity for providers and employers to work together.

Closer links

If closer links between employers and providers are the answer, how do we enable this to happen? In time I believe that we will get into the habit of co-operation on skills, but some form of pump-priming is needed to get things started. A great example is the way that Foundation Degree Forward brings together employers with providers to design qualifications together. The needs of the employer for economically valuable skills can be incorporated, but so can the equally important need of the provider to ensure transferable skills. This model for employer engagement could be applied in many other areas of the qualification framework.

Diversity

Engagement between employers and providers will never be easy, there is just so much diversity of need and method, but I am absolutely certain that we will look back on this period as one where great leaps forward were made in establishing models of closer co-operation. And when I am next in Sunderland I shall tell my colleague there to talk to his Sector Skills Council and his local providers and tell them what he needs for his business to succeed, shiny shoes or not!