天美传媒

It鈥檚 been a good year for good jobs policy

IER was established 45 years ago with funding from the UK Government and what is now the European Commission. Its task then was to provide labour market forecasts to support policymaking. Although government emphasis on skills has remained constant, government interest in employment policy more broadly has waxed and waned over the years.

How do we define a 'bad job'? Moving beyond arbitrary thresholds, a new study published in The Economic and Labour Relations Review applies a novel wellbeing-based methodology to identify bad jobs in South Korea's labour market. Using Korean Working Conditions Survey data (2014-2023), IER's Dr Sangwoo Lee and Emeritus Professor Francis Green (UCL Institute of Education) demonstrate that workers in the bottom decile of job quality experience distinctly larger wellbeing gains when moving above this threshold – providing empirical justification for defining these as 'bad jobs'.

Professor Philip Taylor attended the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) event in Boston on 12-15 November 2025. He co-chaired sessions on job quality and social care and spoke about early findings from a UK project — Just Systems — where he talked about decarbonising domiciliary adult social care. Added to this, he chaired a meeting of the Aging Workforce Interest Group of GSA, of which he is the convener.

A pioneering study published in provides the first comprehensive examination of multidimensional job quality premiums for university graduates across European labour markets, challenging long-held assumptions about the returns to higher education.

The findings carry important implications for how we evaluate higher education outcomes and may help explain why objective graduate advantages don't always translate into higher subjective wellbeing—the so-called "paradox of the dissatisfied graduate."

In early September, the UK and Saudi Government held a joint Great Futures Leadership Summit in London. It was the largest gathering of UK and Saudi Ministers and included the signing of a number of commercial deals between the UK and Saudi Arabia.

One of these deals was the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding that involves IER providing research, evaluation, training and advice to the Saudi Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development to support the Saudi Government鈥檚 Vision 2030.