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IER has been working with the Co-op Group to evaluate its apprenticeship programmes. The initial study was halted due to lockdown restrictions and it was decided to change the focus of the study to see how apprenticeships could be developed to meet the changing job roles and skills needs, and help to ‘build back better’.

The study focused on the two sectors where the Co-op delivers most apprenticeships: food retail and funeral care. The research involved the analysis of employment and apprenticeship data and interviews with the main employers, sector groups and providers across the two sectors.

Despite distinct differences between the two sectors, there were a lot of common themes including a broadening of job roles, more flexible working and the need to develop digital skills.

The report '' was launched at a virtual conference on Thursday 26th November. Attendees included sector stakeholders, apprenticeship organisations and Government Departments.

The nationwide lockdown in India hit migrant workers particularly hard and once travel restrictions were lifted, 11 million interstate migrants returned home. In this blog, Bhaskar Chakravorty, IER PhD student, and colleagues, present key findings from a telephone survey of young people from Bihar and Jharkhand who were trainees of a large skill-based training programme, titled ‘Deen Dayal Upadhyay Grameen Kaushalya Yojana’ (DDU-GKY) in India. It places disadvantaged rural youth into formal salaried jobs in manufacturing and services, often in urban areas in other states. The survey findings focus on the impact of the lockdown on interstate migrant workers and their willingness to migrate again in the future. Read more .

Sally-Anne Barnes, Jeisson Cárdenas-Rubio, Jenny Bimrose and Derek Bosworth have been presenting on recent work to collect UK vacancy data.

As part of extending the data available in LMI for All, IER are currently piloting a web scraping technique to collect UK vacancy data. LMI for All brings together different sources of labour market data, but a complete and reliable vacancy dataset has been difficult to find. A web scraping method is currently being used to create a vacancy dataset mapped to the UK occupational classification system.

The team have presented to the Department for Education and the Skills Advisory panels this month, whilst Jeisson will be presenting more on the methodology at the upcoming Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence and BEIS virtual workshop on online job vacancy data in December.

Phillip Taylor, Professor of Management at Federation University Australia and Honorary Professor at IER, talked about the 'Early Lessons and Promising Workforce Practices from COVID-19' at a webinar hosted by the AARP, the World Economic Forum and the OECD. The webinar is part of their Living, Learning & Earning Longer series. Listen to the recording .

The COVID pandemic has exposed middle-class self-employed people who have lost work to the very low rates of benefit available on Universal Credit in the UK (even including the supplement recently added by the Treasury). Envious eyes have looked across the Channel to Germany where support for the unemployed is so much more generous.

In a recent edition of Radio 4’s programme, Professor Noel Whiteside described the historical origins of the very different systems of social insurance found in both countries.