Employability - Issues For Public Policy

Issues For Public Policy

The above definition of employability provides a basis for analysing the policies affecting the employability of certain groups (e.g. 16 and 17-year-old school leavers), or conversely how major policy initiatives (e.g. the New Deal) impact on employability. A brief review of government initiatives in this area suggests that policy is aimed:

• more at the development and accreditation of knowledge and vocational skills than at the ‘softer’ skills and attitudes
• more on the demonstration of assets than their deployment — particularly for adults (e.g. lack of provision of a careers education and guidance service for adults)
• more at individuals looking to enter the labour market (e.g. from education or unemployment) than within
• more on the individual and the supply side, than on employers and the demand side (i.e. the labour market contextual factors).

This policy orientation may reflect a variety of factors such as difficulties in defining, assessing and verifying ‘soft skills’, and difficulties identifying and accessing specific groups of employees at which to target limited resources.

Thus some key questions for future policy interventions include:

• who are the priority groups
• where the most serious gaps are for such groups be they related to e.g. which assets, dimensions of deployment or presentational skills
• how these gaps might best be remedied and
• which of the arms of public policy are best placed to add such value and how through interventions.

Finally, whatever the interventions, they need to be evaluated so that lessons can be fed back into further improvements and to the decision to continue with, change or stop such interventions. Potential measures include those relating to input measures, e.g. possession of vocational qualifications, or the receipt of careers management training; perception measures, e.g. the views of employers and the workforce of their employability; and outcome measures, e.g. the speed at which people are able to get jobs or ‘measurements of failure’, e.g. the numbers or proportion of people with difficulty finding or keeping work, or the number of job changes, however defined. Obviously there is room for some combination of all three. Whatever route is chosen, it is important to take account of the overall state of the labour market and how it is changing, to take account of any dead-weight effect and assess true additionality.