IER News & blogs

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.

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.

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.

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.

Erika Kispeter gave a talk at the Westminster Higher Education Policy Conference online event entitled ‘The graduate labour market post COVID-19' on 20 October 2020. The conference focused on how university careers services, employers and governments should prepare students for employment in the UK in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Erika’s talk on the 'The impact of postgraduate qualifications on employment prospects' drew on the results of the recently completed research project 'Degrees of Advantage? A longer-term investigation of the careers of UK graduates', the latest stage of Futuretrack, IER’s longitudinal study of graduate careers. The study follows a cohort of UK graduates who started their university education in 2006.