Professor Jenny Bimrose (IER) will be hosting the fourth Organisational Innovation ESRC seminar at the University of Warwick on 18 September. IER has organised the seminar on behalf of the Aston Business School. The seminar entitled 'Building skills at individual level: the role of workplace learning and national apprenticeships' includes a welcome from Professor Jenny Bimrose and Professor Helen Shipton (Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University). Professor Alan Brown and Dr Lynn Gambin, from IER, will be presenting alongside Professor Lorna Unwin (Institute of Education, University of London), Professor David Guile (Institute of Education, University of London), Professor Alison Fuller (University of Southampton) and Professor David Collings (Dublin City University).

This seminar will investigate how medium-sized businesses can realise the potential opportunities that modern apprenticeships offer, especially bearing in mind the Coalition Government’s intention to expand this provision, and will look at other potential sources of new skills, for example, graduate employment. For more information on the ESRC seminar series - Organizational Innovation, People Management and Sustained Performance see: http://www1.aston.ac.uk/aston-business-school/research/centres/aston-centre-for-human-resources-achr/esrc-seminar-series-overview/.

IER and Cambridge Econometrics are currently undertaking a review of the literature looking at seven key methodological issues in estimating returns to Higher Education, Further Education and Skills. The project is sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).

As a part of the project, a one day workshop is being hosted at the University of Warwick and is being chaired by Prof Peter Elias (IER). A number of academics will come together to hear findings from the review and to discuss their views and experiences of these issues. The aim of the study and the workshop is to set forth recommendations for BIS (and others) to utilise in future analysis so that the estimated economic value added of different forms of learning are robust and representative of the true underlying returns.

If so, we would love to talk to you.

The Institute for Employment Research at the University of Warwick is doing some research for the Home Office on why and how different groups of people work in hotels, restaurants and fast food outlets or in the construction industry in the Greater West Midlands area. The experiences of those working in these two sectors of the economy will be compared and contrasted.

IER’s Terence Hogarth made a presentation at the Adult Learning: Spotlight on Investment conference organised jointly by Cedefop and DG Education and Culture in December. The conference website has now been updated with conference papers and photographs from the event (http://adult-learning-investment.eu/).

Terence’s presentation on the Benefits of Training for Companies highlighted findings from recent quantitative and qualitative research carried out by IER, focusing on: the rationales which guide employer provision of training; the extent to which this satisfies employee expectations and aspirations; effects on job satisfaction and worker motivation; implications for organisational performance; and consideration of how the economic environment affects approaches to training.