New tools to tackle a turbulent employment landscape

With workers across the country needing support to understand how their career skills fit into a challenging employment landscape, Nesta Challenges is backing a wide range of innovations to help equip people with the information and tools they need to succeed. Many of these innovations are now available to local authorities looking to improve working futures for people in their area. Sponsored comment from Nesta Challenges.

Automation and the rise of the green economy are transforming the skills needed for a whole range of jobs, while making other roles likely to disappear entirely. Combine this with the ongoing difficulties presented by the pandemic – which recently caused the unemployment rate to rise to its highest level for two years – and it is more important than ever to empower workers with the information and tools to succeed.

Local authorities have an essential role here, being well placed to understand the needs and considerations of people in their area. But in an increasingly volatile employment landscape, this can be particularly tough. We must ensure that local authorities are equipped with the latest innovations to help people in their area, to ensure that nobody gets left behind in a changing employment landscape.

The wide variety of sectors which will see major changes as more tasks become automated include retail, manufacturing, construction, transport and healthcare. CBI research suggests that nine in 10 workers need to learn new skills or be retrained entirely over the next decade to adapt to the changes caused by new technologies and a changing economy. To help workers feel confident understanding what jobs are available in their area and the skills needed to secure them, people need access to relevant and tailored job information, as well as accessible ways to retrain and the ability to pivot their careers.

One of the challenges is that adults who most need career training are the least likely to be doing it. Participation in training by people in lower-skilled jobs which are most at risk of automation is currently 40% lower than for higher-skilled workers. To bridge this gap, we must scale up ways to make career information and guidance more targeted to people’s individual needs and circumstances.

For local authorities, harnessing the power of technology and innovation – to make job information and training more tailored and engaging – is a vital part of the solution. This could include eLearning platforms which break training courses down into manageable chunks, or intelligent assessments which identify people’s strengths and learning or career preferences. Digital platforms such as mobile apps can present guidance about jobs in creative ways offering behavioural nudges, to guide and motivate people through learning processes. Behind all of these solutions, artificial intelligence can bring together diverse sources of data to create new insights into the skills needed in a local area.

To help adults across England navigate a changing world of work, Nesta and the Department for Education have identified a wide range of innovations to help equip adults with the tools they need to thrive, through the Career Tech Challenge. Last year, innovators, entrepreneurs and technologists from around the country put forwards ideas and services to support adults in England currently employed in the sectors most likely to change due to automation.

Since April, Nesta has been working with the most promising innovators to build and enhance their approaches – and many of them are now available to local authorities wanting to improve job opportunities and skills training in their area. Some of the innovations available include:

• Yuno – a mobile app which combines tech with employment psychology, it allows jobseekers to create profiles by playing a simple game that helps to identify their personality, interests and values. The app then provides personalised, local career recommendations, and connects workers with employers willing to train them

• Wordnerds Jobs – by analysing large volumes of text from job adverts, Wordnerds has built an understanding of the language used by different employers to describe the skills they need, allowing jobseekers to use this to find the most relevant career options for them

• Digital Pathways – this online platform provides local people with an online one-stop-shop to access employment and training opportunities and job information. Local authorities using it can encourage people to consider specific sectors of most relevance to their area

• Sort/Switch – a website helping people to understand the skills they already have, and discover potential career paths that are most compatible

• Sparq – an AI-powered platform that works with career advisors as well as jobseekers, to support people most vulnerable to job changes and encourage them to consider new roles

• Stay Nimble – a career development platform that helps people to discover their strengths, find new careers and develop new skills, supported by registered career coaches.

By scaling up the use of these kinds of innovations, we can ensure that many more people benefit from clear information on the jobs available in their local area and understand how to secure those roles. Faced with a challenging and fast-changing job market, we need to help everyone to feel prepared, not precarious.

If you’re interested in finding out more about any of these innovations and how to work with them, visit https://careertechprize.challenges.org/finalists/ or contact careertech@nesta.org.uk.