World Youth Skills Day recognises the strategic importance of providing young people around the world with the necessary skills for employment, decent work and entrepreneurship. July 15th was first declared World Youth Skills Day by the United Nations General Assembly in 2014 and has been celebrated each year since. This year, the theme centres on “Skilling teachers, trainers and youth for a transformative future.”

In this blog Dr Jamelia Harris gives a preview of her thinking so far on creating a future of healthy jobs, based on a paper she is currently working on.

The paper is for ReWAGE, the work and employment expert group hosted by Warwick IER and co-chaired by Warwick and Leeds Universities, and has been commissioned and funded by Deloitte.

IER's Dr Sally Wright co-wrote a blog with Dr Michael Kohlgrüber from Dortmund TU University on skills for the future of work, drawing on insights from the BEYOND 4.0 project.

Find out more about future (digital) skills requirements on the Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung Athens' Future of Work project website.

Blog by Clare Lyonette, Sudipa Sarkar, Gaby Atfield, Beate Baldauf, Bhaskar Chakravorty and Erika Kispeter

‘Soft’ skills are important labour market skills and include social aptitudes, language and communication capability, friendliness and ability to work in a team. Using survey data collected at two time points from a large sample of disadvantaged young people enrolled on a skills training programme in India, we examine whether caste affects initial levels of soft skills, and whether or not these skills can be learned during a relatively short period, providing young people with longer-term opportunities within the labour market.

Britain produces too much of relatively low value compared with many of its western counterparts. This is despite the country being a world leader in many industries. It is the country’s perennial productivity problem.

Improving skills supply is seen as one of the principal means by which the country’s productivity levels will be raised. But what does improving skills supply mean? Sometimes it seems to refer to matching – if only it were possible to ensure that skills supply better matched the jobs available matters would improve. And sometimes it refers to raising the level of skills, even if there is a degree of uncertainty about how much demand there is for any additional higher skills. If Britain, or more precisely England, is to increase its productivity through the improved supply of skills - however that might be defined - it might well need a bold, new skills strategy to do so. Does the latest Skills for Jobs White Paper fit the bill?