IER Newsletter

IER Newsletter - March 2023

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Professor or Associate Professor post at IER

The IER is seeking to appoint a Professor or Associate Professor, who:
• is a recognised labour economist or social scientist with strong quantitative and/or qualitative skills
• has a track record in one or more of IER’s areas of research and importantly,
• will want to undertake research that makes a difference to policy and practice.

Full details are available at the University of Warwick website. Closing date is 24 April 2023.

Labour market and skills projections at national, regional and sub-regional level

In October 2022, IER and Cambridge Econometrics produced new UK labour market and occupational projections to 2035 as part of the Skills Imperative 2035 Programme, a five year research programme funded by the Nuffield Foundation and led by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) (see earlier IER news item).

National, regional and sub regional level labour market and skills projections to 2035 have now been published as part of the Skills Imperative 2035 Programme with additional funding from the Department for Education (DfE) for the sub-regional analysis.

These projections cover:

the UK nations - England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland – plus data for the whole of the UK
English regions
Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) areas
Local Skills Improvement Plan (LSIP) areas and
Mayoral Combined Authorities (MCA) in England.

The projections, disaggregated by occupation industry and employment status, as well as by broad level of qualification are available as Excel worksheets via the DfE website, together with general guidelines and a workbook user guide.

Both the UK and the national, regional and sub-regional projections have been undertaken by IER and Cambridge Econometrics, led by IER's Professor Rob Wilson. The team includes Shyamoli Patel, Ha Bui, Xinru Lin, Daniel Seymour and Chris Thoung from Cambridge Econometrics and Rob Wilson, Derek Bosworth, Luke Bosworth, Jeisson Cardenas-Rubio and Rosie Day from the Institute for Employment Research at the University of Warwick.

ReWAGE news

Members of ReWAGE’s expert group have been busy since our last update, particularly Professor Jill Rubery, who was not only named on the 2023 Northern Power Women List, but also found time to speak at the Women and Work APPG alongside ReWAGE co-chair Professor Chris Warhurst.

Read Jill’s profile on the ReWAGE website to find out more about her and why she became one of our experts. Jill’s views were also featured in a new British Academy Journal article about inflation, wages and equality in the UK today, which was introduced by fellow ReWAGE expert Professor Paul Edwards.

The Good Jobs sub-group published a report on Job quality and productivity in the small firm, which considered the characteristics and working practices of small businesses and the ramifications for policy makers seeking to improve job quality or to measure job quality in the UK.

And Professor Catherine Barnard produced an excellent summary of the EU Retained law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, which raised a number of issues with the process around ‘sunsetting’ nearly 4000 pieces of retained EU law.

Establishing a new National Centre for Creating Healthy Jobs

IER hosted a meeting at the RSA in London in mid-March on its initiative to establish a new National Centre for Creating Healthy Jobs.

The aim of the centre is to minimise the number of jobs that lead to ill-health and increase the number that support good health. The meeting was opened by Dame Carol Black, the former UK Government advisor on work and health. Around sixty participants from universities, government and heath and business organisations attended the meeting. For more details of the Centre, contact Prof. Chris Warhurst: c.warhurst@warwick.ac.uk.

The Future of Work and Industry 5.0

Director of IER, Chris Warhurst, chaired a panel in Brussels on 28 March to discuss the future of work. The panel was part of the end of project conference for Beyond 4.0.

The discussion focused on the limitations of Industry 4.0 and the opportunities for promoting Industry 5.0. Panel members were Judith Kirton-Darling, Deputy General Secretary of IndustriAll; Erja Sankari, Executive Vice President of COO iLOQ in Finland; Karina Angelieva, former Bulgarian Deputy Minister of Innovation and Growth and of Education; Andrea Glorioso, Policy Officer at DG EMPL in the European Commission; and Liviu Stirbat, Director of the new Industry 5. 0 unit with the European Commission.

Chris Warhurst awarded Fellowship by the Academy of Social Sciences

In its spring announcements, Director of IER, Professor Chris Warhurst, has been conferred as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

The Academy of Social Sciences says in its press release: 'The Academy’s Fellowship is made up of distinguished individuals from academic, public, private and third sectors, across the full spectrum of the social sciences. Through leadership, scholarship, applied research, policymaking, and practice, they have helped to deepen the understanding of, and address, some of the toughest challenges facing our society and the world.’

Accolade for Professor Peter Elias

IER’s Professor Peter Elias, CBE, FAcSS, has been elected as a Fellow of the International Statistical Institute (ISI), which brings together an extensive network of statisticians from over 100 countries.

Trained as a labour economist, Peter served as a Strategic Advisor for Data Resources to the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) between 2004 and 2016, assisting with the development of the UK research data infrastructure. With Professor Kate Purcell, Peter has also been co-leading Futuretrack, a longitudinal study which followed up students up to around fifteen years after graduation.

New journal special issue on digital technology in the workplace

Chris Warhurst is the co-editor of a new journal special issue on ‘Cross-disciplinary perspectives on the duality of digital technologies’.

It is published in the journal Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations and includes articles on the use of digital technology for homeworking during Covid and evaluation of workplace interventions to introduce new technology for example. The introduction to the special issue can be found on the journal webpage.

Bobillier Chaumon, M.-E., Delgoulet, C., Greenan, N., Lemonie, Y. & Warhurst, C. (2022). Éprouver la dualité des technologies digitales en croisant les regards disciplinaires / Cross-disciplinary perspectives on the duality of digital technologies. Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations, 77(3). https://doi.org/10.7202/1094207ar

Other publications

Harris, J. (2023). Exploring donor-driven skills development as a channel of continued aid dependency, Third World Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2023.2178889

Hunt, W., Baldauf, B. and Lyonette, C. (2023). Horses for Courses: Subject Differences in the Chances of Securing Different Types of Graduate Jobs in the UK. Journal of Social Policy, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047279423000041

New projects

Tameside - In work progression - proof of concept.

Find more information on IER's current projects.

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