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This report presents findings from the planning for success survey, which examined student outcomes and career planning strategies. The report looks to: (1) understand career planning strategies and how they affect student outcomes; and (2) identify factors associated with positive graduate outcomes. The study examined a cohort of UK domiciled students who completed their full-time undergraduate study in 2011/12 and were aged 18-21 at the outset of their study. The cohort consisted of 7,500 students drawn from 27 institutions. The study combined data from the six month Destination of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey with data from a follow-up survey conducted two years later. It employed multivariate analysis techniques to understand the relative importance of different behaviours, characteristics and factors in determining graduate outcomes. [The study] considered in turn: what led graduates to a positive outcome, that is employment or further study rather than unemployment; what led graduates with a positive outcome to employment, and what to further study; what led the employed to professional or managerial employment as opposed to non-professional employment; and what led those in professional or managerial employment to full-time as opposed to part-time roles.

The three factors which were most important in guiding graduates to a positive outcome, that is employment or further study rather than unemployment, were: (1) undertaking paid work while at university or in the six months immediately after; (2) focusing job searches exclusively on graduate level jobs and making most applications while still studying; and (3) having a career plan upon leaving university. A technical annex providing detail on the survey methodology, weighting and data analysis of the survey is also available.

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In 2015 the Welsh Government secured European Social Fund funding to support the delivery of its apprenticeship programme across Wales for January 2015 to March 2019. The aim of the evaluation is to assess the effectiveness, efficiency and impact of the programme for the period 2015 to 2019. The evaluation will focus on the performance and impact of the programme, with some review of the programme design and delivery processes. The evaluation has two main phases, interim and final.

This is the report of the interim evaluation phase, which takes a formative approach and focuses primarily on programme performance to date and how delivery has worked in practice. This interim phase of the evaluation begins to test the theory of change behind the programme by asking the following questions: Does the rationale for the programme still hold? Has it changed? Are resources available and being used as planned? Are activities delivered as planned and to agreed standards? Are the 'right' people taking up the programme? What factors are affecting starts and participation? Is the programme making a difference? Is the impact as expected or are there unintended effects? At what cost?

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This research was commissioned to investigate the attitudes and behaviours of employers around the recruitment, retention and retraining of older workers. It aims to go beyond traditional employer survey responses in order to gain a deeper understanding of employer attitudes and experiences of managing older workers. The findings in this report are based on research case studies conducted with 50 employers in England, Scotland and Wales. Half of the case studies were carried out with employers in sectors that have large volumes of low paid workers including care homes, cleaning contractors, and employers in fashion retail and transport. The remainder were distributed between five broad sectors covering the economy as a whole.

Key findings [are that]: (1) employers value the benefits of a mixed-age workforce, and generally state that they already have one; (2) older workers are described as loyal, reliable, committed and conscientious, with valuable business and life experience to offer the organisation; (3) fear of contravening equal opportunities legislation can prevent employers from collecting and analysing information on age within their workforce; (4) existing flexible working policies and procedures are seen as effective to meet the needs of older workers; however, these policies are not always clearly articulated and are predominantly used by new parents; and (5) flexible working arrangements are more likely to be made for long-standing employees than for new entrants.

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The survey is a source of data on skills and the labour market. It offers an insight into the micro decisions that employers make about factors such as recruitment, training investment and use of skills in the workplace, which underpin the macro-level trends that drive UK economic growth and productivity levels. The survey highlights how changes in the economy are impacting on firms differently. Overall, vacancies and skill-shortage vacancies have increased significantly over the last two years, with some sectors in particular facing heightened difficulties in recruiting staff, such as in construction and finance. However, in many cases there has been persistence over successive waves of the survey in the areas in which difficulties are most commonly reported. For example, manufacturing remains one of the sectors most likely to report that their vacancies are hard to fill for skill related reasons, despite declining employment levels and this has been persistent over the Employer Skills Survey series throughout the 21st century; skilled trades is the occupation in which employers are most likely to report skill-shortage vacancies. These variations, in addition to geographical variation, raise questions about how local and national governments ensure the maximum value of any policy response, which needs to be mindful of the variations in experiences reported here and the contextual factors which shape these experiences.

But there are questions for businesses too as the survey raises questions about the levels of demand for, and use of, skills by employers and whether these are at the right levels for the business. For example, the survey shows that a minority of businesses operate high performance working practices but those that do have a higher demand for skills; that managers are the occupational group least likely to receive training, but will be instrumental in decisions about business and people strategies; that two million staff have skills not currently being used in the workplace and that the impacts of skill shortages reported by employers have the potential to be very damaging to business, yet the persistence of many skill deficiencies suggests that training decisions, in some businesses at least, may be sub-optimal. At a micro-level, these factors may be damaging for the business; at a macro-level, they could be damaging for the UK economy and hamper the sustainability of UK economic growth.

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The Employer Skills Survey (ESS) provides intelligence for understanding the skills challenges faced by employers, both in terms of their existing workforce and when recruiting, and how they respond to these challenges through investment in training and workforce development. Over 81,000 employers participated in the 2019 wave, however, although ESS has been a UK-level survey since 2011, employers in Scotland were not included in the 2019 survey. Another methodological change for the 2019 survey was that the question areas were broader than previous ESS, and included key elements of the Employer Perspectives Survey, which focuses on what drives decisions around recruitment and people development, as well as involvement and experiences with specific programmes such as apprenticeships. The study reports the experiences of employers at establishment level, with interviews conducted with the most senior person at each site with responsibility for human resources and workplace skills. Employers with at least two people on their payroll were in scope for the survey.

Chapter two discusses recruitment activity and difficulties in filling vacancies due to skill-shortages. It examines the proportion of establishments with vacancies and skill shortage vacancies at the time of the interview, the volume and density of such vacancies (i.e. the proportion of vacancies where skill shortages are encountered), the skills lacking in the available labour market, and the impact of skill shortage vacancies on employers. Chapter three looks at internal skills challlenges, that is the extent and nature of skills gaps within the workforce and how these affect different occupations, the causes and impact of these skills gaps, and the way employers respond to them. Chapter four explores in detail employers' training and development activities for their employees, including the types of training provided, employers' expenditure on training, and barriers to providing (more) training. The final chapter summarises the key themes emerging from the survey and considers their implications.

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The purpose of this research was to evaluate the Personalisation Pathfinder trial, which was introduced in April 2015 in three Districts of the UK: South West Wales, Surrey and Sussex and Greater Wessex. The Personalisation Pathfinder offered tailored support to those with a disability or health condition who are unemployed and aimed to investigate the impacts of an approach focused on personalisation, flexibility, peer support, and integration with local support. The Personalisation Pathfinder ran for two years and included the following key components: (1) dedicated Specialist Health and Disability Coaches - offered more time and tailored employment support to claimants; (2) Specialist Health Disability Partnership Managers - worked to build partnerships and procuring specialist provision in the local area; (3) Journey 2 Employment (J2E) - peer support job clubs delivered by voluntary organisations through a Community Employment Specialist (CES), and a member of J2E staff with a lived experience of disability; and (4) Personalisation Fund - additional funding to procure tailored provision that could not be covered by existing funding.

This report discusses findings from two waves of a quantitative survey with claimants on the Personalisation Pathfinder as well as from qualitative interviews with claimants and Pathfinder stakeholders. It also includes observations of Journey 2 Employment (J2E) job clubs and interviews with Community Employment Specialists. Findings are discussed in terms of program delivery and outcomes for participants.

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The UK Employer Skills Survey (ESS) is one of the largest business surveys in the world, with the data in this report based on survey responses from over 87,000 employers. This research provides a comprehensive source of intelligence on the skills challenges that UK employers face both within their existing workforces and when recruiting, the levels and nature of investment in training and development, and the relationship between skills challenges, training activity and business strategy. The 2017 survey is the fourth in a series conducted biennially since 2011 (with nation-specific skills surveys pre-dating this). The ESS series therefore provides rich labour market intelligence from the period when the UK economy was emerging from the recession of the late 2000s, to more recent years when the UK has experienced relatively sustained economic growth and high levels of job creation. The latest survey was carried out between May and October 2017. Employers with at least two people on the payroll were in scope, and interviews were conducted at an establishment level with the most senior person at the site with responsibility for human resources and workplace skills.

Key finding include: Recruitment activity has continued to grow since 2015; There has been an 8 per cent increase in the number of skill-shortage vacancies compared with 2015; By occupation, employers were most likely to have experienced skills-related difficulties when recruiting for Skilled Trades positions (such as chefs, electricians, and vehicle technicians); The majority of hard-to-fill vacancies (67 per cent) are caused, at least in part, by a lack of skills, qualifications and experience among applicants; Overall there were around 110,000 vacancies that employers were finding hard-to-fill exclusively for reasons unrelated to applicants' skill levels (11 per cent of all vacancies); By sector the proportion of vacancies proving hard to fill exclusively for non-skills-related reasons was highest in Health and Social Work (19 per cent, up from 13 per cent in 2015); Among employers who had vacancies that were proving hard to fill, one in three (34 per cent) had attempted to recruit EU nationals to try to help overcome recruitment difficulties; Alongside skill shortages that may be experienced when recruiting, employers may also experience skills gaps in their existing workforce; At an occupational level, skills gaps continued to be more prevalent in what might be described as 'labour intensive' roles (i.e. Elementary occupations and Machine Operatives) and 'service intensive' occupations (i.e. Caring, Leisure and Other Services staff and Sales and Customer Service staff); Transient factors, such as staff being new to the role or training only being partially complete, were a contributing cause of most skills gaps (76 per cent); As was the case in 2015, the most common skill lacking among staff was time-management and prioritisation of tasks, contributing to nearly three-fifths of all skills gaps (59 per cent); In line with the two previous ESS surveys in 2013 and 2015, two-thirds of employers in the UK (66 per cent) had provided training for their staff over the past 12 months, with either off-the-job training or on-the-job training provided by around half of all employers in each case (48 per cent and 53 per cent respectively).

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