What are the biggest reasons for the disconnect between education and the evolving world of work AND what can we do about it?

I joined a great panel event hosted by Matrix at the CIPD Festival of Work in June, (the second best attended event after Stacey Dooley I am told, and I can live with that!). One of the topics I touched on, when it comes to talent for the future of work, has lead me to ask myself:

 

What are the biggest reasons for the disconnect between education and the evolving world of work AND what can we do about it?

 

Why are so many firms still finding it as tough as they are, to hire diverse talent from school, college and university?

 

Is it simply because education is tough to connect and engage with? Is it employers don’t understand well enough how schools work, & their priorities, when it comes to employability? (a quick tip, please don’t treat schools like a job centre to just promote your roles!) Or is it something more fundamental?

 

The first two are factors in this disconnect for sure, but there are two big fundamental challenges I see, more and more, which are:

1. Perception
2. The barriers that exist

 

What are some of the perception issues?

How different sectors are seen? Let’s take as an example Financial Services, for many young people they will have perceptions such as:

• It’s all about money
• I need to be good with numbers and maths
• Financial services is a very wide sector, from investment banking and Venture capital to insurance and retail banking
• People like me don’t work for firms like that or worse still they don’t want people like me

The same can be said for the tech sector and a perception that it all about writing code

 

The skills that are required to both secure a role, and then progress in role

• Is it the ‘hard (technical) skills’?
• But with such a fast-changing landscape many of these hard skills are obsolete within 2.5 years, (recent research from Boston Consulting Group states)
• What skills are needed?
• The confusion when it comes to the different ways skills are described
• Or is it about skill enablers, it the traits people possess to demonstrate the ability to learn new skills.

 

What then are some of the barriers that exist?

They fall into a few groups:

1. Perception barriers as outlined above
2. Cost barriers
   1. To travel to interviews
   2. To have the right clothes to wear
   3. Where ability to drive is a criteria (driving lesson are expensive, insurance for young people is eye-watering)
   4. The list goes on
3. Understanding about the breadth and variety of firms within each sector, and crucially doing it at scale
4. Where specific academic subjects are a requirement eg Physics A level, where only c23% of females study this subject
5. Barriers in the recruitment process, as it is righty demanding but too often leads to individuals, typically those from under represented background,

• dropping out as they being asked to do something they never done before (eg video interview) and have no network to provide support,
• having higher fail rates than their more advantaged peers with network for support

And I have not started on the barriers that exist when in work!

 

So what actions are needed to address both perceptions and barriers?

 

Let’s first start with what happens when you don’t take action

1. Bright Networks recent research shows:

• 1 in 5 declines and reneges, where the key reasons are
  • 29% for more exciting role ie what they perceive to be a more exciting role
  • 26% better salary
  • 17% poor recruitment exp, all those barriers!

And two of these three you are fully in control of.

 

2. You spend more money attracting far more candidates than you need
3. You have to assess many more applicants

All increasing both your cost per hire and speed to hire

 

So what are some of the actions

 

First, who responsible for taking action?

 

We can ‘throws rocks’ at education, or expect bigger organisations, (with more resources), or sector bodies to take action or we can take action ourselves!

 

For me there are some critical actions to drive real change and impact

 

Make it easy to take action

And I am going to focus on one action to take, which involves, like anything which leads to real change, is challenging the status quo or reinventing how things are done.

 

For example: School Work Experience (WEX), when done well, can be a powerful tool to address perceptions and barriers, but for many firms you mention WEX and they think:

• That means a young person is in the office for 5 days in June / July time
• Each of them shadowing a member of staff, which you need to find, brief and support

So in essence they think ‘that’s a lot of work’ and either we don’t have the time, or for those who do, at the end they breathe a sigh of relief that it is done and had no big issues; waving the students off into their future!

 

And for the young people it is luck as to whether they have an interesting week, and therefore what they learn. And too often what they learn due to this inconsistent, ‘luck-driven’ experience is I don’t like that sector and write the whole industry off (and tell their friends!)

 

As a result of the above, not enough firms offer work experience, nor use it as part of their wider talent strategy.

 

How can it be done differently:

‘Discover Finance’ is a new initiative for the Financial Services (FS) sector, where over the traditional work experience week (June / July), young people take part in a rotational work insight programme spending 1-2 days with 2-3 firms from across FS over the week (in the same town or city). And to drive more scale a 3 day (rather than 5) rotational work insight programme can happen in the winter and spring half terms.

For the firms:

The format is classroom based, to drive a consistent experience for all and much less resource to set up all the employee shadowing, and easy for employees to join  for a hour or longer to share insights.

And after the Insight programme, all the young people are directed to a Talent Pooling platform (called ‘A Future In Finance’) where they can continue to learn more about the sector, skills and career pathways, plus connect (safely) and ask questions of existing employees in different FS firms to learn more and build a sense of belonging for the sector; and firms can  also then advertise their roles to this engaged and informed talent community.

For the young person:

They gain insights into both the different parts of the sector, better understand both the skills they have and need to develop, and also what to expect in a recruitment process (and how to do well!).

This ensures the work insight programme is not a one off intervention, but they can continue their exploration journey and develop themselves (through the platform), and when they ready to apply the platform supports them at every stage of their recruitment journey!

 

For the school

• Their students gain insights into multiple firms
• They as a school engage with one programme but multiple firms (so time effective for them)
• They can provide these experiences at different times of the year, to give more students the opportunities
• This is not a one-off intervention, thanks to what the platform can offer
• This is about enabling their students to progress into good quality work after they leave education

 

So, through a sector or skills based collaborative approach firms will grow the size and diversity if their future talent pool, leading to lower cost per hire.

The barriers and perceptions issues are too big for one firm to fix.

Collaboration is a constant refrain from me!