September 12, 2024

Get young people future ready with employability skills

Employability skills cover a range of abilities that enable individuals to thrive in the workplace. These include technical skills or knowledge, and transferable skills, like communication and teamwork.

Employer engagement, in-work progression, and transitions into good jobs are all interconnected with skills development and understanding and developing these skills is crucial for young people to be future-ready.

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What’s employability day?

Each year, the Employment Related Services Association highlights the progress made by organisations in closing employment gaps and supporting individuals in overcoming barriers to work. Employability Day serves as a reminder of the collective effort needed to enhance employability across the nation.

Hundreds of organisations in the Skills Builder Partnership are providing opportunities for people to build their essential skills. As a collective partnership we champion sustained, long-term solutions that benefit providers, employers, and most importantly, individuals to thrive.

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Employability and employability skills: What are the skills to be future ready?

Skills Builder defines essential skills as the highly transferable skills that everyone needs to do almost any job. They are listening, speaking, problem-solving, creativity, staying positive, aiming high, leadership, and teamwork. Employers consistently prioritise these skills, recognising their importance for productivity and career success, here’s what we know about the importance of essential skills for employability.

Changing workplace landscape

With the rise of automation and artificial intelligence, the nature of work is transforming. Jobs that require uniquely human skills such as creativity, problem-solving, and emotional intelligence are becoming increasingly valuable.

Demand from employers

90% of UK employers now say soft skills are more important than ever before. NFER research projects there is a growing need for essential skills to support individuals to thrive, projecting that that 7 million individuals might lack the essential skills they need to do their jobs by 2035.

Enhancing social mobility

Research reveals two groups of less advantaged workers: about 13% who, with a comprehensive set of skills, enjoy strong income, life satisfaction and job satisfaction; and 17% of workers who, with low levels of essential skills, don’t break out of the skills trap.

Boosting earnings and wellbeing

There is an annual wage premium associated with higher levels of essential skills of up to £4,600 for the average person. They also boost job and life satisfaction.

People value these skills

86% of people say essential skills are important for overcoming adversity, and 71% believe them to be important for academic attainment. (Essential Skills Tracker 2022). Essential skills are overwhelmingly recognised as important for careers by the UK working population, with a higher proportion (92%) identifying them as vital than almost any other skill (Essential Skills Tracker 2023)

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The Eight Essential Skills icons. Listening, Speaking, Problem Solving, Creativity, Staying Positive, Aiming High, Leadership, and Teamwork.

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Building essential skills for employability with young Londoners

Skills Builder Partnership has a unique position at the intersection of business, education institutions and social impact, working together to ensure that one day, everyone builds the essential skills to succeed.

Since 2022, we have seen the impact that this cross-sector collaborative approach can have through working in partnership with London's Violence Reduction Unit (VRU), supported by the Mayor of London. The VRU is a team of specialists who bring people across London together to better understand why violence happens and to take action to prevent it now, and in the long-term. The approach is rooted in prevention and early intervention, championing and giving a voice for young people and communities across London.

The Skills Builder-VRU partnership has a focus on working with the Young People’s Action Group (YPAG) to reflect on, articulate and capture the development of essential skills through the YPAG's activities, which include panel discussions, consultations, service reviews, and social action projects. The Skills Builder Essential Skills Academy provides a structured and explicit focus to the core skills being developed through events, and members of the YPAG capture their development through Skills Builder Benchmark, an online self-assessment tool for essential skill development.

Young people reflect on the essential skills they are developing through their work with the YPAG, and are supported to consider how these will transfer to other areas of their life, including moving into and thriving in the world of work.

Skills Builder have been working with the Mayor’s Sport team on Mayor of London Sport Internship Programme. The programme provides 12-month paid internship opportunities to young Londoners from groups typically underrepresented within the sports industry, as part of the Mayor's commitment to ensuring all young Londoners have access to good quality jobs. Partners hosting interns are leading organisations within the UK sports industry:

As part of the Mayor of London VRU Sport Internship Programme, each organisations’ interns, mentors, line managers and HR professionals identify the essential skills that are required for them to be effective in their work. These forward-thinking employers understand the value of a diverse workforce that reflects the city they represent, and are willing to make internal changes to ensure they're bringing in young talent and supporting them to grow and thrive. The Skills Builder Universal Framework provides the common language and shared approach to structured development conversations, and allows organisations to measure the progress of young people, and their wider teams.

Liona Bravo, Programmes and Policy Officer at the Greater London Authority said Skills Builder was “providing a framework that allows us to measure and reflect the essential skill development along the way in a way that is accessible and relevant to everyone involved.”

Gareth Plumb, Community Engagement Lead at London’s Violence Reduction Unit praised all the young people involved, “teaching us and the sports organisations how best we can support young Londoners into long term careers they are passionate about, with Skills Builder Partnership supporting the process.”

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How to equip people in their early careers with essential employability skills

We know how people with higher levels of essential skills have higher earnings, higher job satisfaction, higher life satisfaction and higher social mobility and, on a national level, having a more skilled workforce can also result in greater productivity, and can ultimately contribute to a stronger economy overall. We have also seen across the Skills Builder Partnership how a range of employers that have leveraged a structured approach to skills in order to boost their recruitment, staff development & outreach.

If you are looking to provide greater opportunities for building employability skills within your team, here are some ways you could get started:

Skills Builder Benchmark, an online self-assessment tool that helps everyone understand their essential skill strengths and developments areas. It’s free to create individual accounts, and offers admin access for organisations who want to see individuals’ skills data, to plan training opportunities and measure impact.
Skills Builder Benchmark provides individuals with a snapshot of their current skillset and supports them to identify new areas for growth. Each skill is broken down into themes, and then smaller steps, so you can make quick and easy reflections.

Skills Builder Launchpad is a free resource platform for individuals to build their own essential skills, with short and engaging interactive modules that build every step of the Universal Framework. The platform also gives you a place to reflect and record how you’ve applied essential skills, articulating your skills to others through independent reflection, discussion with a mentor or by recording examples of when you have applied the skill step. This recorded journey allows you to build a digital skills portfolio over time.

The Skills Builder Careers Explorer is a dataset of essential skills profiles for over 1000 jobs, using Standard Occupational Codes from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to determine which skills are required to do each job effectively. The tool supports individuals to understand how they can perform tasks effectively, and where their skill sets might take them, and can be used by companies to inform their hiring decisions.

The Skills Builder Career Explorer complements assessment on Skills Builder Benchmark and the development resources offered on Skills Builder Launchpad, helping you align all aspects of HR and talent development more closely to the Universal Framework for essential skills.

The Skills-based CV Guide is a free resource that helps individuals to showcase their essential skills. The guide supports a 5-step process to identify essential skill strengths and provides a structure for articulating these effectively in the format of a skills-based CV.

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