IER Newsletter - November 2020 View this email in your browser LMI for All new vacancy dataset Sally-Anne Barnes, Jeisson Cárdenas-Rubio, Jenny Bimrose and Derek Bosworth have been presenting on recent work to collect UK vacancy data. As part of extending the data available in LMI for All, IER are currently piloting a web scraping technique to collect UK vacancy data. LMI for All brings together different sources of labour market data, but a complete and reliable vacancy dataset has been difficult to find. A web scraping method is currently being used to create a vacancy dataset mapped to the UK occupational classification system. The team have presented to the Department for Education and the Skills Advisory panels this month, whilst Jeisson will be presenting more on the methodology at the upcoming Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence and BEIS virtual workshop on online job vacancy data in December. *|END:IF|* Directors of Skills workshop IER with the Edge Foundation hosted an online workshop for the skills directors of the Mayoral Combined Authorities (MCAs). The workshop discussed the most pressing issues facing the MCAs and how they were preparing to support their areas' emergence from the pandemic.*|END:IF|* Career: how to keep a professional employable? As an invited panel speaker Sally-Anne Barnes joined the Career Summit on 28 October organised by the Municipality of Porto through the Cidade das Profissões in Portugal. The panel comprising Jaana Kettunen, Daniela Lourenço, Luís Sottomayor, Artur Queiróz and Gregoire Evequoz discussed how to keep a professional employable. Sally-Anne drew upon recent research for the European Commission on lifelong guidance policy and practice undertaken with Jaana Kettunen from the Finnish Institute for Educational Research. The panel was hosted by Carolina Maria de Bessa Ferreira from Cidade das Profissões and moderated by Teresa Espassandim, a specialist in vocational psychology and career development. *|END:IF|* Early Lessons and Promising Workforce Practices from COVID-19   Phillip Taylor, Professor of Management at Federation University Australia and Honorary Professor at IER, talked about the 'Early Lessons and Promising Workforce Practices from COVID-19' at a webinar hosted by the AARP, the World Economic Forum and the OECD. The webinar is part of their Living, Learning & Earning Longer series. Listen to the recording here. Noel Whiteside talks about the history of Britain's welfare system on Radio 4 The COVID pandemic has exposed middle-class self-employed people who have lost work to the very low rates of benefit available on Universal Credit in the UK (even including the supplement recently added by the Treasury). Envious eyes have looked across the Channel to Germany where support for the unemployed is so much more generous. In a recent edition of Radio 4’s Analysis programme, Professor Noel Whiteside described the historical origins of the very different systems of social insurance found in both countries, pointing up how William Beveridge’s scheme, described in his 1942 Report to form the foundation stone of Britain’s post-war social security, never managed to operate as its author intended. Not designed to reflect previous earnings, flat-rate subsistence-level benefits were swiftly corroded by post-war inflation, forcing those out of work with no other resources to resort to means-tested national assistance, even before Mrs Thatcher came to power (and reduced income replacement rates considerably). The German system, of course, requires both employers and employees to pay a much higher proportion of their salary into five social insurance schemes. In the UK, this question of contributory costs has long dogged debates when considering a similar strategy. As a result, social insurance as such has rarely operated in Britain, where means-tests and conditionality have grown constantly to dominate the provision of state support to the socially dependent. (Image credit: BBC Radio 4 website) New article on the health impacts of non-standard employment Rebeka Balogh, IER’s joint PhD student with the Interface Demography research group at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, has co-authored an article on the links between non-standard employment and mortality using Belgian longitudinal data. The online first article was published in the Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health. Covid-19 blog series: Covid-19 lockdown and migrant workers in India The nationwide lockdown in India hit migrant workers particularly hard and once travel restrictions were lifted, 11 million interstate migrants returned home. In this blog, Bhaskar Chakravorty, IER PhD student, and colleagues, present key findings from a telephone survey of young people from Bihar and Jharkhand who were trainees of a large skill-based training programme, titled ‘Deen Dayal Upadhyay Grameen Kaushalya Yojana’ (DDU-GKY) in India. DDU-GKY places disadvantaged rural youth into formal salaried jobs in manufacturing and services, often in urban areas in other states. The survey findings focus on the impact of the lockdown on interstate migrant workers and their willingness to migrate again in the future. Read more here. Publications Green, A., Owen, D., Atfield, G., Baldauf, B., Bramley, G. and Kispeter, E. (2020). Employer decision-making around skill shortages, employee shortages and migration: Literature Review. Birmingham and Coventry: City-REDI, University of Birmingham, and Institute for Employment Research, University of Warwick. Find out more about our new virtual IER bookcase containing recent books and monographs (co) authored by IER staff here.