Kester Brewin, associate director: communications and training development at IFOW, explores insights from the Pissarides Review into the future of work and wellbeing
Hardly a day goes by without new headlines about AI and automation revolutionising all aspects of work and society - diagnosing cancers, healing potholes, driving efficiencies in government - but what does research tell us about how these innovations are changing the way we work - and our experience of it - and how can this help graduates and careers advisers better navigate the future of work?
Funded by the Nuffield Foundation, the Pissarides Review into the Future of Work and Wellbeing is a three-year project led by Nobel Laureate Professor Sir Christopher Pissarides that has taken a multidimensional look at how new technologies are changing the labour market in the UK, with a particular focus on workers' health and wellbeing. Workstreams steered by leading academics explored system-level, firm-level and individual-level impacts, with outputs including the first national 'Disruption Index' - mapping how technological transformation is progressing across the country - and a survey of 5,000 UK employees examining how exposure to workplace technologies is affecting their wellbeing and job quality.
For graduates and careers advisers, perhaps the most significant element of this work has been a new analysis of changing skills demands. Looking at tens of millions of job ads and using machine learning to extract information from them on what skills employers are looking for, the Review has been able to understand in greater depth just how demand for particular skills is growing or waning.
What this shows is that demand for tech skills is growing… but that these skills are also showing the greatest turnover. Importantly, this suggests that moves to 'upskill' graduates in a particular tech skill - having some fluency in HTML, for example - could be misplaced, as these specific tech skills show such great flux.
Instead, the research highlights how core communication and interpersonal skills remain consistently in high demand. Ensuring that these are developed and honed must clearly be a priority. While it is good to have a strong research basis for these priorities, they are likely ones that most graduates and careers advisers had at least a tacit understanding of. But there are two further dimensions that have surfaced during the work of the Review, ones that offer more rich perspectives on how graduates can flourish in a labour market in which technology is such a major player.
The first of these dimensions is that of thinking about 'capabilities', rather than just skills. This is based on Amartya Sen's work on a 'capabilities approach', which emphasises not just people's wellbeing, but their freedom to pursue the lives that they want.
A focus on capabilities, rather than skills, is what creates a workforce that is resilient to transition and better able to flourish.
In the context of work, while measuring outcomes like job satisfaction or earnings can be useful to measure changes over time or inequalities in a population, it doesn't tell us whether people have the freedom to pursue these outcomes. A purely skills-based approach can tend to treat workers as 'passive' subjects into which skills are inputted by training. What a capabilities approach does is offer environments that give people agency to choose and curate their training and upskilling. Importantly, in a labour market undergoing major restructuring in the face of AI, the Review suggests that a focus on capabilities, rather than skills, is what creates a workforce that is resilient to transition and better able to flourish.
For graduates approaching the labour market, and careers advisers helping them, understanding this dimension of capabilities - of being an applicant who displays the agency to thrive in an active environment - is important. If our research findings are acted on, firms will be looking less to assess skills than 'capabilities' to capture a more comprehensive and aspirational picture, and operate as part of the co-development of more tailored, future-oriented innovation and career pathways that lead to better jobs and happier employees.
The second dimension is around the analysis the Review has done on how skills are interrelated, grouped in clusters, and the extent to which skills are required alongside other skills from the same cluster or spread across different clusters. This helps deconstruct the boundaries between 'tasks', 'skills and capabilities', 'technological abilities,' or even jobs. Instead, we are able to see more clearly how these components are defined by their relationships with each other.
The implication of this work for graduates is two-fold. Firstly, we see that more diverse skills are being demanded by employers more often, shown in an increasing need to combine social and technical skills to cope with, and shape, the transitions being precipitated by AI. This again reinforces the importance of capabilities as graduates present themselves in applications. But, secondly, the clustering analysis means that, while a graduate might not have the specific skill being asked for, they may well have closely-adjacent skills in the cluster, meaning that they are suited to more jobs than current algorithmic filtering systems might suggest. This is important both for employers seeking quality candidates, but also for graduates thinking about which roles they are able to apply for.
If we are to build a fairer future of better work, we need to better understand how new technologies are changing our experience of work, and people's access to it. Our hope is that the significant findings from this research will be taken on board by governments, skills bodies, firms - and graduates too.
Read the full report of the Pissarides Review here.
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