238. How to prepare the UK workforce when 3 million jobs are at risk

0:11Hello and welcome to The Rest is Money with me Steph McGovern. Now one of the big things we love talking about on this podcast is skills, the future of work. How is AI going to change things for our workforce and how do we make sure we don't leave people behind and all that? You hear Robert and I talk a lot about education and the importance of it and whether, you know, the schools are doing the right stuff to get people trained in the things we need for the future world of work. So today, that's what we're going to focus on. I've got some excellent guests to chat through this who come from different walks of life.

0:48It's off the back of a report that's just come out from the National Foundation for Educational Research. Now, they're an independent not-for-profit organisation who are really focused on, you know, research and analysis to help improve outcomes for young people. They've got this new skills imperative report that's come out. It's five years of work, and one of the big headlines from it is that up to three million UK jobs are at risk over the next decade. So we have the CEO from the National Foundation for Educational Research here, Carol Willis. Hello, Carol. Hello. Thank you for joining us. Carol, I know you've held lots of different roles in your career.

1:25You're an economist, aren't you? You've worked in government departments, various senior roles, including the Department for Education. So I'm very interested to hear, Carol, what you've got to say. Also with us, we've got Amjad Ali, who's actually joining us from a school where he is training today. So Amjad is part of the leadership team at Chiltern Learning Trust, which has about 18 schools across Bedfordshire and Luton. He spent 19 years teaching and leading in diverse and high need schools. Hi, Amjad. So you're in the middle of training, aren't you, in one of the schools you work with at the moment?

1:58Yeah, so we do some support as part of the trust work. it's a part of one of the government programs we get sent into various schools to just offer some guidance and some suggestions on what people can do maybe a little bit more efficiently a bit more effectively yeah excellent so i'm just loads to ask you about as well and also with us we've got will bridgman who runs his family engineering firm warrens services you guys manufacture parts don't you for various different sectors so it's like defense and automotive the oil sector and things like that. Yeah very diverse yeah we're a subcontract manufacturing business.

2:33Yes and I know the reason I've got you in is because you guys work really closely with your local community don't you to get that pipeline of of skills and workers through so that you get the people you need. Yeah our long-term skills pipeline is very important to us right from working with primary school children right through high school and then entering our business as apprentices. Yeah it's fascinating what you're doing and I think we need more of it across the economy so we'll definitely chat about that. So, Cara, let me start with you then. This skills imperative, tell us a bit about what it is and what you guys found.

3:07Thank you very much, Steph, and thank you for having me on the programme. So, the skills imperative is a major five-year programme of research led by NFER working with other academics and researchers and funded by the Nuffield Foundation. And we wanted to understand what the world of work might look like in future and what kinds of skills would be needed to do the jobs of the future, particularly given some major underlying trends affecting the labour market, like the growth of technology. So we've used large forecasting models to explore what the UK economy might look like in 2035, which jobs might increase, which might decline.

3:48We've looked at what this means for the skills that people will need to succeed. And we've surveyed 12 ,000 adults and young people to estimate the current level of skills in the labour market. And our findings do confirm that urgent action is needed by employers, by government, by education providers. So we are forecasting a significant shift in the labour market over the next 10 to 15 years, with increasing demand for professional and technical occupations, So managers, scientists, lawyers, accountants, and you'll be pleased to hear engineers, but also falling demand for many mid and low skilled jobs.

4:34So secretarial work, administrators, sales and retail workers. And there are around 12 million people who work in those at risk occupations at present. And as you identified at the start of the podcast, we're expecting about one to three million jobs to be lost in those at risk sectors over the next 10 years. And is this AI? This is AI taking those jobs? Yeah, partly AI and particularly entry level jobs. But it's changing lots of aspects of people's jobs as well as replacing jobs entirely. importantly we've identified a set of key skills that people will need in the labour market of the future they're transferable skills and they are skills that complement technology so as there is more technology more automation those kind of human interaction skills are going to become more important and our recommendations reflect the fact that people's skills and gaps open up very early when children are very young and they grow over time.

5:44So we've recommended that action is needed across the life. And these skills that you've identified, you're calling them the essential skills. In the past, people would have, I think, wrongly referred to them as soft skills, because these are things like communication, aren't they? Tell us what these essential skills are. So communication, collaboration, problem solving, creative thinking, the ability to critically analyse information. They're in short supply now, so there's already a lot of demand for these skills. And we've estimated that 3.7 million workers currently don't have sufficient levels of these skills.

6:24So that's holding back productivity, particularly actually in higher skilled roles. But they're going to become more important because they're more prevalent in the jobs, the occupations that we expect to grow in future. So you might have the technical skill needed to do a particular job but what you're seeing a lack of is the other things that you need to be able to do it well. Exactly, yeah exactly. So let me bring in Amjad then to give us the kind of reality on the ground in schools because these essential skills that have been identified are not necessarily are they the things that schools are being judged on in terms of what they're providing to kids?

7:02I mean I could talk generally for most educators we wouldn't disagree with any element of the report and say absolutely those skills are necessary and we want our young people to leave schools with a suite of qualifications and those necessary skills. However with league tables having just been published recently with the accountability measures on schools so hard with a report card system on grading of schools things naturally get squeezed out when you're being told you have to do this and this and judged on this and that and almost the football manager-esque model of headship that a lot of schools are experiencing is difficult to balance both and as you know over your time being involved in education and talking about it reporting on it everything falls to schools now I don't disagree that these skills school leaders and school systems should put in place, but having the time to do all is an interesting conundrum that we face.

8:02Because you're not being, essentially, you're not being assessed on that. When Ofsted come round and look at what you're doing, they're not valuing these essential skills as things that you're providing. I mean, they won't be looking for those individually or discreetly or kind of overtly. However, we don't always do things based on what Ofsted want or what the kind of accountability measures are. But naturally, my issue with this is whilst I work with lots of schools in disadvantaged areas, the best way out of those systems is through qualifications and through systems that they can then break those poverty cycles.

8:41And attaching the two of them together is absolutely necessary. But it's the ability to be able to go, right, we're standing firm on this. And as a result, it's going to take a hit on this because you can't prioritize everything naturally. Yeah. And so in that kind of in your role and what you're doing and working with these schools, with these, you know, as you described, these areas where, you know, it's where I grew up. essentially it's like deprived areas where already you've got a million things you're contending with just to get that person into school and you know they might not have eaten when they get to school so therefore you've got that just paint that picture of what that reality is that maybe you know politicians perhaps don't understand or you know business leaders when they're trying to work out who to employ and they are just basing it on qualifications what is it that what's the reality out there?

9:34I mean the reality is that a lot of children will never ever wear a suit until an interview other than whether they have a blazer on their school uniform. A lot of children will not understand the social etiquette that you need to put yourself in in different environments like having grown up in those exact areas like yourself we adapt and become social chameleons and adapt to the kind of language streams that we're in or the environments that we're in And there used to be a phrase that I don't know if people are still using it that much, that cultural capital element of how are we going to invite our children into these spaces?

10:13And all of those things require trips, money, risk assessments, travel. I mean, having worked in Oxfordshire and Reading and now in Luton and Bedfordshire as part of the Children Learning Trust, you know, to get a coach from one of those areas into London is around£1 ,000. and then you have to add that onto a ticket price and add that onto whatever you're doing just the financial implications is are really terrible um and something that i often say to teachers that they kind of i don't know how it goes down you might have grown up working class but lots of us are not working class anymore in terms of our financial situations our children where we live how we live and our understanding of poverty to how we grew up is very different to how we are now and I think it's a it's a stark picture that a lot of areas and a lot of people don't understand yeah and I want to come back to some of that Amjad but let me bring in Will because Will the reason I wanted you to come in is because I was really inspired listening to you and your dad talk about what you do with your local community to actually help schools and help young people and parents as well with understanding the the jobs that are in the area with with those essential skills we've heard carol talk about so just and it started because you had a need for people you weren't getting the right people you needed were you so tell us what you yeah so my when my father moved the business his previous business to norfolk or suffolk at that time you know there weren't necessarily the skills available so he realized you know both my grandfather's were apprentices, he was an apprentice, we needed to carry on that tradition.

11:55But speaking to what Amjad said about schools, you know, it is about exposing those young people to the possibility. We had 265 year six primary school children through both factories in one day and two other businesses on our estate, so they could experience what manufacturing was really about, what, you know, road recovery vehicles was about, what plastic coating was about. But that was a collaboration and rightly it is expensive with the council paying for the buses working with the schools working with business to pull that all together to give them that experience but i really worry about the way we measure things as we've said before it's sort of lazy employers are lazy the government are lazy they go all right we'll just look at exam results that's an easy way of filtering people out but they're probably not the skills you really want yeah the things that we're really worried about is can I get to work on time and have they got a thirst to learn things because the school are never going to teach them the things that we need as in technical skills because we're doing high-end welding high-end machining those things a school can't teach that we even our apprentices that we sent to college they learn the fundamental maths and science around that thing but the actual the doing thing is done in our factory but it's interesting that you mentioned year six children coming in because they're what age 10 11 they're the kids who are just finishing primary school about to go to secondary school why are you doing that at that age then and you know you're talking about hundreds of kids there that i mean that sounds quite wild as well it was absolute chaos and we've done it for the last three or four years as part of national manufacturing day so make uk last thursday of september every business should open their doors but particularly we've got a male bias in our business we've got lots of female leaders in senior positions, but we need to encourage more young women to enter our industry or our business.

13:49And if you start talking to them when they're 15 or 16, it's too late. We need to make them excited about making those engineering choices, being inspired into studying science and maths at that early age, because lots of these young people, they've never, they see these big metal boxes in their town, but they don't know what goes on. So it's our responsibility to show them what happens in there what's really interesting though is how you mentioned there about the council and obviously you're working with schools how did you build those relationships because that because as amjad's rightly said you know for the school that would be expensive to pay for the coach also you're eating into lesson time which could then impact the learning in terms of the curriculum so how did you how did you build that how did you get that network i make myself a nuisance right so but i try and do my bit to help the council to help the school so like we say our local academy so they're the high school students we provide all the dt materials we provide design technology yeah design technology so i want those young people making things the school haven't necessarily got the budget so if i provide them all the metal and plastic and wood they need they're going to make more things and do you genuinely see a return and investment then do you end up getting people from that school yeah we because of our geographic location we try and recruit all of our apprentices from our town and all of those children go to that academy so it's a do we see a direct could you attribute it directly i look at it more holistically you have to because other businesses will say i went to school once and nothing happened that's it doesn't work like that it's a long-term partnership with the schools with the council with the primary with the high school yeah and it isn't just that manufacturing day is it because you also do then work like you say you provide the materials for design technology but you also do work experience work experience we do careers events we take virtual welding into their events we've got a lego challenge we rebranded our offering so our stand wasn't our commercial stand when we took the stand to school it's based around like our lego challenge so it was more aimed at 14 to 16 year olds rather than old grey men in suits buying our services so we had to treat talent acquisition like business development if we want the right people it's a long-term investment yeah and then that is the commercial side to all of this because then you get good people and you get the talent you need it's really interesting this carol this whole thing around as amjad said you know it's the knowledge qualification versus i guess the skills that you really need in the workplace like have we got a balance problem with that well of course both are important and I'm really interested to hear what Will's saying about his company engaging with schools and colleges because that's so important and you're a sounds like you're a beacon of good practice and absolutely children in primary school do develop their career aspirations but one thing I did want to say is that skills can be developed as part of teaching the core curriculum.

16:56So you need problem solving skills in maths, you need critical analysis of information skills in history and science. So to some extent, they do appear as part of the core curriculum, and therefore they are assessed as part of the exam system. And the independent review of the national curriculum was recently published. And they have also recommended that skills are strengthened in the curriculum so including oracy which is speaking and listening skills which is crucial obviously for communication and collaboration and also digital and media literacy which includes skills around critical analysis of information so there will be a greater focus on that in the core curriculum but amjad we spoke to a number of school and college leaders as part of our research and they very much echoed some of the points you were making earlier around both confusion around what the key skills are, how to develop them, and also whether they can be developed as part of the curriculum, which is so busy and takes up so much time.

18:03So that's why we've recommended that more work is needed around how those skills can be taught as part of the curriculum, and the government sets that out clearly. Developing tools to set out how these skills can be assessed so that school leaders teachers understand how children's skills are developing and where further action is needed and also to evaluate what works best what are the best ways of developing these skills alongside knowledge but I mean back to the knowledge point I mean knowledge and understanding is crucial to developing a lot of these skills if you want to solve problems in maths you need to be able to multiply and divide and so on if you want to communicate you need grammar you need to understand grammar.

18:48Amjad what do you think? I don't disagree with anything that anybody said so far I think what's interesting in terms of the business links I've been in education this is the start of my 20th year and around five or six years in we had local organisations and local businesses really willing and eager to get into schools and then people started to feel the crunch and started to feel the pinch and started to feel the difficulties of kind of spending that or investing that money in. I've worked in Oxfordshire and one of the largest kind of STEM or STEAM allocation of employers around the UK possibly.

19:25And they would be looking at outsourcing that work and getting in kind of people from other areas and not kind of localizing the need. now while skills are needed for example if i give you a simple uh reference point for english i'm an english teacher the speaking and listening component become non-compulsory become non-mandated in the sense of non-graded and then lots of schools just for time and just for purpose of where they were just went right well we'll do this and we'll do it well and we'll develop that skill but if it's not graded a lot of our children will simply say what's the point sir what's the point miss and we will say yes absolutely it's a skill and it's a communication necessity that you need but like you said the the foundation for skills is knowledge and something that i just want to highlight and i highlighted this at the policy launch i think there's still a long way to go for businesses and employees understanding the variation in skills for neurodivergent people as alongside neurotypical people.

20:27So we have this holistic societal norm of what good communication is or what good teamwork is or good problem-solving skills are. But we haven't quite grasped, especially in business world, the fact that there are neurodivergent people that demonstrate those skills in differing ways. And the stats suggest that with the limited number of autistic adults working in full-time education, with the limited number of adults that have ADHD working in full-time education at full-time employment that is a problem that we need to kind of delve into a little bit more yeah yeah will what are your thoughts on that because you you know if you have you seen that change in terms of the people coming to you in terms of neurodivergence yeah and it's it's another way of when we've got potentially full employment you know it's difficult to employ good people you've got to look outside of the box so we work with the job center work with long-term unemployed people so we might have someone on an eight-week work experience program so they've struggled to get a job they probably don't interview very well they're probably more than likely on the spectrum but if you invest the time in those people you have to appreciate that they're not going to communicate the same way but that can be a superpower in certain job roles you know i've said before i'm i'm really dyslexic that made it difficult for me in certain ways but is really beneficial in others and with neurodivergent people you can't put that round peg in a square a hole but if you find the right job role for them and and treat them in the right way they can become amazing employees and they're not going to be nipping off down the road to somewhere else because you've given trust to them invested in them and you know you it can really pay real big benefits to a business it's really interesting this because i have this obsession with that you know people say oh how can we make someone fit in so you're trying to make everyone the same and actually that's what it shouldn't be about education it should be partly about allowing you to be yourself but then how do you compare schools if you're doing that and how do you it's what i'm just it's like if you're not measuring it it won't get done these schools are under immense pressure to deliver so yeah everyone does nine gcse's because then if you mess one up you've got eight that's the progress eight or maybe it's more effective we only do eight so it doesn't matter but then some of these children are failing all of them so why are we but there isn't another route because they're measured on those things so i i worry about these young people they leave school they've failed they haven't really but no one's given them anything that they could be good at yes you know there's no there's no there's not a lot of practicality left in a school amjad yeah so for us um and for me personally my viewpoint on schools is i want to give them the best possible next step and that that's where i want that to be That best possible next step could be an exceptional set of exam results, could be 12 GCSEs, could be moving on to A-levels, or it could be getting into an apprenticeship or moving on to an employment or skills-based qualification.

23:24That's absolutely what is necessary. So we do have another accountability figure or measure, which is NEAT, not in employment, education or training. So a lot of schools should be or should have this looked at. Like, what are your neat figures? Where and what happens to your young people when they leave your school? Yes, they might be able to get eight nines at GCSE, but where are they going next? Earlier on in my career, for the first 10 years, we did work experience for year 10s and 11s routinely, regularly. And now with the amount of money it costs for risk assessments and all of those kind of provisions that are put in place, if you're not in an area where that is quite widespread, a lot of schools have just gone, we can't afford it anymore.

24:05We can't do it. Yeah, we're seeing this problem now in primary schools with schools closing, reducing number of classes, having mixed age classes because their income per pupil, their revenue, falls faster than their costs. And that lower birth rate population dip is going to feed through into secondary schools in the next two or three years. So I think Amjad's right. But what I was going to pick up on, Amjad, is some of the points you've raised, I think, particularly affect children and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. So there's absolutely a social justice lens to our work as well.

24:44So they tend to have, when they're young, less access to high quality early years education. They have less access to enrichment activities. so sport and drama and chess clubs and Duke of Edinburgh Award all of the things that are positively related with developing these kinds of skills they progress at a slower rate and on average have lower attainment so that all means they have lower levels of these essential skills lower qualifications and they're much more likely to be working in these at-risk occupations that might decline and to be not in education and employment. Yeah, it's interesting, Amjad, because you said this on the phone to me recently, and I think it was a really, really eloquently put.

25:34You said, look at us, Steph, as parents. We are, we might have come from working class, but we're now middle class. We can give our kids the skills they're not getting in school because we will take them to football. We will take them to dancing, in my case, with my daughter. You know, we'll do all these different enrichment things, But the kids at school who haven't got the parents, who've got the money or the carers who can afford to do that are not getting those skills. And, you know, the schools have to teach them the qualifications because that is what they're judged on. I mean, if you look at my trust, for example, Christmas Eve will serve thousands of meals to the community.

26:15Thousands of meals. Our staff come out voluntarily, work on Christmas Eve and provide for the community. Predominantly, Luton is a very ethnically diverse place, irrespective of whether they're Muslim, Christian, whatnot. We link into the communities. Now, we can still do that because there is a hub and a trust and we're an amazing set of schools and organizations. When I was growing up, the only way I would have got any of that was via schools. The only way I went to a theater show first time was via school. A first football match was via school. First rugby match, cricket match, et cetera, was via school.

26:50Now, as parents, as growing up as middle class or working class and, you know, economically deprived, however you want to label it, the gap is now schools are not wanting to do that. They just can't anymore. And they just can't provide those additional things. Now, a lot of charities and organisations are stepping in and supporting and doing that. But we live in a country where there are heat banks. I found out recently that there are baby banks. So don't worry about food banks. You know, I'm looking to give away some of my children's toys because Christmas is coming up. And before Christmas, rather than what lots of people do after Christmas, they go, we don't want these toys.

27:30There's baby banks in our areas. And so with these deficits and these difficulties, the disadvantaged students are triple disadvantaged now. and it is a real concern for us but what a lot of schools will do will highlight those things and think right what we're going to do the school I'm in today for example they've got a drop down day for year 10 it's an enrichment day and they're looking at careers and guidance so those things are great but as you know Steph and everybody else listening one day three days not a lot it's not enough yeah so much more to talk about but we're going to go to a quick break welcome back to the rest is money with me steph mcgovern we're talking about skills today obviously it's a passion project of myself and robert about how we make sure uh we get the right people with the right skills for the jobs we need so with me i've got carol willis who is ceo of the national foundation for educational research and they've done lots of work around this amjad ali who's part of the central team at chiltern learning trust in other words uh he's uh in the teaching sector and is part of the 21 schools in across Bedfordshire and Luton and also Will Bridgman who runs his family engineering firm Warren Services.

28:43I want to come back to Will on the positive side of this and what you are doing because hopefully you know what we want to see is more of what your business is doing so one of the things you do is with parents as well isn't it that parental engagement because I have seen this a lot in some of the schools I've worked with up in the northeast there's a there's a because there are a whole generation of parents who aren't in employment who feel education did nothing for them they were let down by education essentially um then they're not engaged with their child's education and it's not because they don't love their kids it's just education did nothing for me so i'm not going to bother you don't need to worry it'll be you know you'll be all right school didn't help for me but you kind of do stuff around that as well don't you so we try and be a good employer in the town so doing things in the town we had a you know we built a new beacon for the town we sponsor the sports teams we always insist if a young person wants to get an apprenticeship that their parent or carer or guardian is part of that process because when they when they come and see us they are still children you know they're 15 at that point we have an open evening the parents come with the children the children have normally been to the one of the factories before as part of a school event but yeah we want to make sure the town knows that we want to do good within our town because ultimately it's the parent helps the child make that decision so the more we can do to make them aware of us being an employer being focused on the town and it is really worked for us we have you know we've got a grandmother mother and daughter work for us we've got husbands and wives fathers and sons so you start to build that momentum and they want their children to then come and get a job but i think we as businesses have got to do better we've got to explain to the people you know and you're joining us you've you've gone through your schooling but your education will continue yeah when you come to work yeah it's really really good advice um so i want to move things on from young people to the kind of lifelong learning point and because there's a big, Carol, thing around reskilling, isn't there?

30:57There's going to be, as you've pointed out as well from your research, lots of jobs going. There'll also be the creation of lots of new jobs. And how do we make sure we don't leave people behind? How do we get that transition? Yeah. And just to be positive for a moment as well, actually, overall, our research suggests there will be an increase in the total labour market around 2 million jobs. But of course, their jobs are growing in some areas and we're losing jobs in others so it's about both supporting people in those at-risk occupations that are going to decline with lower levels of skills lower levels of qualifications to transition into those higher skilled jobs but also those who are already in those higher skilled jobs don't have enough of those skills at the moment so that is holding back productivity and economic growth.

31:48So we need to reskill and upskill across the labour market. And we've recommended that the government and employers look again at their investment in the existing workforce. Spending on adult education has fallen by around 30 % over the last 15 or 20 years. And so it's no wonder that people are struggling to develop some of these skills. What we did find interesting is there's about 3.4 million people who are currently in work who have more skills than required for their job. So there might be potential for employers to better understand the range of skills of their workforce and to tap into those rather than facing shortages in future.

32:36But in terms of lifelong learning and the new lifelong learning entitlements, there are also barriers for individuals. So there'll be work and time commitments, which make it difficult for them to undertake more training. So there's something there about flexibility, about having short modules, about doing courses online. but people also don't want to take on debt so they'll need to have information about what's available and awareness of why it's so important that they develop these skills so that they can over a longer working life be able to transition be able to be more dynamic in terms of taking on new skills in in growing areas we did some polling work after we completed our our program of research to find out what adults felt about some of the things that we found.

33:32Over 40 % of adults don't feel supported by their employers to develop new skills. So I think employers definitely need to take more responsibility like Will's organisation for developing their workforce. But we also found that two thirds of working age people are confident that they will be able to develop their skills and that sounds good yeah but it makes me worry that they're not aware of the extent of the changes that are likely to be coming so that's the awareness raising piece about being developing these skills yeah we've got three young ladies actually doing an apprenticeship at the moment that have come from two from child care and one from hospitality so they're now reskilling in one's working in our commercial team so quoting looking at jobs pricing, one's in our quality team and one's in our procurement team.

34:23They're all doing a level three business admin, it's quite general, but then they will do more specialist training if they stay in those particular areas that's right to that area. You know, we've had issues before where we use robot process automation, so automating some of our processes and we were looking at it in the accounts department. Actually, the person in the accounts department said, I don't really like being in accounts i just sort of started it from school and it's quite well paid but i like the idea of this automation stuff could i learn how to do that and now that that's what they do full time right they don't work and was that much of a training transition between the two they went on google and did they and just learn how to do it she is completely self-taught wow i went to a conference in london it's a software called uipath it's different types of road prep crisis or derogation she's literally taught herself and they're the best people that have taken responsibility for their own learning the internet has got amazing resource if you want to if you really want it can i just get then as your your thoughts on you know how you what do you want people to take away from this in terms of what happens carol's laid out you know the issues in terms of jobs we're going to lose but will you've talked about what you're doing which we'd love to see replicated and amjad you've talked a bit about like the issues and schools and things and how we need to think about learning what you want people to take away from all of this we'll start us off i think if businesses and industry really want to affect their future workforce they need to be working with their local schools yeah or nationally with schools or do some sort of program there's no good just sitting there going well the teachers aren't teaching what i want well you unless you actually interact with them you know we need as industry to be responsible for helping produce the future workforce.

36:10Yeah, and the way you said it earlier about it should be part of your business development plan, not a kind of box ticking corporate social responsibility thing. It's actually where you're going to get the skills from. Carol, what are your final thoughts? Well, the government are focusing very heavily on young people at the moment. So they've recently announced measures to increase access to apprenticeships for young people, to increase access to work placements and training to help reduce those numbers, not in education and training. And there is a new skills white paper. But I would reinforce the importance of looking at action across the life course.

36:48So don't forget those families in disadvantaged backgrounds and their children. Support schools to help develop these skills and look at how to increase investment in adult skills. It will pay off in the end. Yeah, yeah. Amjad? I just think we need to redefine how we look at certain things. So previously, if a prospective employee went to a job interview and they saw that they had six different jobs, people would say, well, they clearly can't hold down a job. Whereas now we need to say, actually, they've picked up six different sets of skills to be able to come and work in this workplace. we value experience which is valuable but we also need to value a variety of experiences and we need our young people to understand that those traditional model high status jobs are not the only jobs out there and i and just as a personal thing the amount of teachers that don't tell students that they can be a teacher fascinates me it's like why why don't you share the fact that our job is a brilliant job too we need more teachers we absolutely do yeah and that's a whole podcast on its own yeah um but it's that idea of i would say to students yeah you could become a teacher what i don't want anybody to say is try this and if it fails then do something else we want everyone to aspire to the best but there's a variety of things that are the best yeah yeah okay well thank you um all for your time i mean there's been loads there food for thought and just, you know, really inspiring stuff as well that you're all doing.

38:23So thank you very much for giving me your time to chat about it. And Steph, if anyone wants to find out more about our five-year programme of research and the 15 reports that we've produced, then they can go to the NFER website and search on the skills imperative. Lovely. Thank you very much. Your PR team will be happy. You've got your plug in. I like that. Anybody else want to put any PR plugs in before we wrap up? Will? Thanks very much. And that's it for me on The Rest is Money. Bye-bye.

38:57Transcription by CastingWords