IER News & blogs

After only a few months, the global Coronavirus pandemic has affected workers worldwide in a profound way. Strict social distancing and lockdown measures around the world have halted daily activities, presenting a threat to the livelihoods of billions of workers who rely on their daily earnings in the informal sector.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that almost 1.6 billion informal workers or nearly half of the global workforce are significantly affected by pandemic measures. In Indonesia, 55% of the workforce or around 70 million people work in the informal sector. Unregistered, unregulated and unprotected by secure employment contracts and social safety nets, informal workers are some of the most vulnerable in the labour market.

Since the start of the pandemic, the UK Government has described the numbers of individuals applying for Universal Credit as ‘unprecedented’ with 2.5 million applications since the lockdown in March. So with unemployment levels at an all-time high and global changes to work and labour markets as a result of the pandemic unavoidable, this is the time to think about enhancing the system of support and guidance in the UK. A system is needed that not only supports those out of work to return to the labour market, but also supports those who have had to change their role, and/or take on new roles. What seems likely is that most of those who are more able, more skilled and more adaptable will return to the labour market faster, whilst those who are less skilled and less resilient are more likely to struggle to return to the labour market.

Throughout May, Sally-Anne Barnes, Jenny Bimrose and Alan Brown have been delivering a number of webinars for the careers community in the UK and internationally.

Webinars have covered their recent research on the role of parents in providing careers guidance and how they can be better supported, and lifelong guidance policy and practice in the EU. Training webinars are also planned on the use of labour market information (LMI) as part of the new learning modules available on the LMI for All website.

So far, webinars have been run for the Career Development Institute (CDI) in the UK, as well as the New Zealand Career Development Association (CDANZ) and the Careers and Transition Education Association (CATE) with many more planned over the next few months, including for Australia. Listen to the CDANZ webinar here.

The Working Futures 2017-2027 projections, produced by the IER in collaboration with Cambridge Econometrics, were published by the Department for Education in February 2020.

The IER has now created a new web portal from which all the reports plus all the Excel workbooks containing the projections for UK nations and regions and Local Enterprise Partnerships within England can be downloaded.

Please note that these projections are based on employment estimates derived from published labour market data. They are not precise predictions of future employment levels, but represent the most likely trajectory of labour market change, given long-term trends in the economy and explicit assumptions about likely future economic change.

The forecasts were created when it was expected there would be a negotiated Brexit and before the Covid-19 pandemic, which has resulted in considerable disruption to the UK and world economic system.

Unemployment and scarcity of jobs have long been important concerns for policymakers in developing countries (World Bank, 2012). These issues are crucial for India as the country is home to the world’s largest population of young people ready to participate in the labour force (UNFPA report, 2019). The current situation caused by the Covid-19 outbreak and the subsequent countrywide lockdown is certain to affect employment levels in the country, especially as India has a large informal economy, which is currently bearing the major brunt of the lockdown. In this context, targeted Active Labour Market Policies (ALMPs), which have been historically used to cushion the economic shock of such global crises in developing countries, can play an important role (Cazes, Heuer, & Verick, 2011; Imbert and Papp, 2015; World Bank, 2012).