I was invited to make a presentation earlier this week to the European Union Horizon 2020 HECAT project exploring the use of algorithms within public employment systems. Waterford (Ireland) Institute of Technology is coordinating the project and according to the WaterfordLive web site “HECAT is a sociologically and anthropologically led project to make data trapped in public employment systems (PES) and national statistical offices available to unemployed people and those trying to help them to improve their personal decision-making and visionary future.” Dr Griffin from the Institute said: “Everyone is concerned or should be worried about how algorithms and big data is being used in the labour market, we cannot put the technology genie back in the bottle, rather we need to figure out how to make the output from these novel technologies ethical, fair and transparent. We need to crack them open sociologically and anthropologically so that traditional researchers can fully understand how they operate and communicate that to the public.”

Anyway here are my slides.

geralt (CC0), Pixabay

There is increasing interest in what labour market information job advertisement portals can provide. OK, most sites will have various skews in terms  of what kind of companies advertise on them, but the good side is that they can provide near real time data about labour market supply and demand. In the UK the best known are probably Burning Glass and Emsi. Of course these are both commercial services, charging for their data. LinkedIn also has been collecting and analysing Labour Market jobs adverts and have recently published a list of the UKs fifteen fastest growing job sectors for 2021, including Top jobs, Top skills and Hiring hotspots.

The job sectors are (in rank order):

1. E-commerce personel
2. Health care supporting staff
3. Digital content freelancers
4. Construction
5. Creative freelancers
6. Finance
7. Specialised medical professionals
8. Professional coaching
9. Social, media and digital marketing
10. Customer service
11. Education
12. Mental health professionals
13. Real estate
14. Specialized engineering
15. Artificial intelligence

Welcome to CiCi. CiCi is a chatbot for careers information developed by a consortium between DH Hughes Associates and Pontydysgu. The chatbot, now being further developed by a new organisation CareerChat, was developed as part of the Nesta CareerTech Challenge competition. This video forms part of the final report for teh competition.

Some of you will know I have been working with a small team on developing a chatbot to support career education and development. The project is one of the twenty finalists in the UK Nesta supported CareerTech Challenge competition. I another post I will provide more detailed report on the work we have done. But first, as part of the final report on the project, we had to submit a three minute video. We had a lot  of  fun with this – here is our entry.

MichaelGaida (CC0), Pixabay

In most countries we have traditionally relied on official labour market agencies for data for understanding the labour market. From an education and training standpoint, that data has not always been ideal – given the main users are economic planners and policy makers – and the data collected is often difficult to interpret from the viewpoint of careers guidance or education and training provision.

One of the main limitations of national data from official agencies is that the sample is often too small to draw conclusions at a local – or sometimes even regional – level. Yet opportunities for employment vary greatly by region, town and city. In recent years there has been a growth in popularity of scraped data, using big data technologies and techniques to scrape and analyse online job vacancies. This work has mainly been undertaken by US based private sector companies although the EU CEDEFOP agency has also developed a multi national project scraping and analysing data. The job advert data is not better or worse than tradition labour market data. It is another source of data providing another angle from how to understand what is going on. Pontydysgu is part of a consortium in the final of the  UK Nesta CareerTech Challenge prize. Our main word is developing a Chatbot for providing information for people whose jobs are at risk as a result of automation and AI. Of course that includes labour market information as well as possibly scraped data and we have been thinking about other sources of data, not traditionally seen as labour market information.

One organisation which is accessing, visualising and publishing near real time data is the Centre for Cities in the UK. It says its mission is to help the UK’s largest cities and towns realise their economic potential.

We produce rigorous, data-driven research and policy ideas to help cities, large towns and Government address the challenges and opportunities they face – from boosting productivity and wages to preparing for Brexit and the changing world of work.

We also work closely with urban leaders, Whitehall and business to ensure our work is relevant, accessible and of practical use to cities, large towns and policy makers

Since the start of the Covid 19 pandemic the Centre for Cities has been tracking the impact on the labour market. They say:

Luton, Slough and Blackpool have seen the largest increases in unemployment since lockdown began. Meanwhile, cities and towns in predominantly in southern England and The Midlands have seen smaller increases in unemployment. Cambridge, Oxford, Reading, Aberdeen and York have seen some of the smallest increases in unemployment since March.

As of mid-June Crawley, Burnley, Sunderland and Slough have the largest shares of people being paid by the Government’s furlough scheme.

In the medium term, as many as one in five jobs in cities and large towns could be at risk of redundancy or furloughing, and those reliant on the aviation industry, such as Crawley and Derby, are likely to be hardest hit. These areas are also the places most likely to be worst affected if the Job Retention Scheme is withdrawn too soon.

One interesting tool is the high street recovery tracker. This compares the economic performance of city centers since the outset of the Covid 19 crisis. At present they say footfall in the UKs 63 biggest cities has increased by seven percentage points in August and now reaches 63 per cent of pre-lockdown levels.

However, this figure hides great geographic differences: in 14 city centres, footfall in August exceeded pre-lockdown levels; particularly in seaside towns and smaller cities. At the other end of the spectrum, large cities like Manchester and Birmingham have barely recovered half of their pre-lockdown levels of activity.

Instead of relying on traditional surveys for this data, which would take some time to process and analyse, the recovery tracker is based on mobile phone analysis. Another potentially interesting non traditional source of data for understanding labour markets may be travel data, although that data is heavily disrupted by Covid 19. But that disruption in itself may be interesting, given the likelihood that those cities with continuing low travel to work numbers are likely to have a higher percentage of office based work, and possibly a focus on non customer based finance and administration employment. Conversely those cities where travel to work volumes are approaching near normal are probably more concentrated on retail and manufacturing industry.

All in all, there is a lot going on in novel data sources for labour market information. And of course we are also looking at how such data might be accessed:hence our Chatbot project.

geralt (CC0), Pixabay

Its pretty hard guessing the future of the labour market at the moment. How bad is the downturn from the Convid 19 pandemic going  to be. Will there be U shaped recession or will there be a rapid V shaped recovery. Who will be hit hardest? What will happen to the hospitality and travel industries. What kind of policies might mitigate against a recession. And what kind of education and training measure are needed?

Things are slowly becoming clearer. And the indicators are not good.

The Brighton based Centre for Employment Studies (CES) released a briefing note today using newly released data from employers planning 20 or more redundancies alongside historic estimates of actual redundancies, in order to estimate the potential path of job losses this year. The CES were only able to obtain the data from the government followin a Freedom of Information request. Estimates of the actual historic level of redundancies are taken from the Labour Force Survey.

Their analysis suggests that redundancy notifications by employers are running at more than double the levels seen in the 2008/9 recession, the vast majority of which is a consequence of the covid-19 pandemic and its economic impacts. The CES estimates  that this may lead to around 450 thousand redundancies in the third quarter of 2020 – significantly higher than the quarterly peak in the last recession (of just over 300 thousand) – and a further 200 thousand redundancies in the final quarter of the year.

Among measure that they suggest are needed to deal with the employment crisis is guaranteed access to rapid, high quality employment and training support for those facing redundancy.

The full report can be downloaded here.

geralt (CC0), Pixabay

Yesterday I attended a webinar organized by the UK Association of Colleges in their Labour Market Observatory Series. The subject of the webinar was Using Job Posting Analytics to understand the changing Covid-19 labour market.

Understanding labour markets is a hard job at the best of time and the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdown have disrupted the economy with unprecedented speed and scale. As Duncan Brown, Senior Economist from Emsi, explained, raditional labour market statistics take time to emerge, especially to understand what’s going at regional and local level, and real-time indicators become all-important. Duncan Brown, talked through what their Job Posting Analytics – derived from collecting (or scraping) around 200,000 new, unique job postings from job boards across the internet every week — can tell us about where and how the labour market is changing and what to look for as we move into the recovery.

First though he explained how the data is collected using bots before being cleaned and duplication removed, prior to using algorithms to analyse the data. He pointed out that there are limitations to the data derived from job adverts but compared to the time taken for official labour market data to emerge, for instance through the UK National Office of Statistics Labour Force Survey (LFS)job posting analytics can provide an almost real time snapshot view of the labour market, and is easily projected at a local level.

My notes on the webinar are somewhat patchy but here are a few take home points, particularly from a question and answer session that followed Duncan Brown’s presentation.

There was a huge fall in online job adverts in April and May with the lockdown – as high as 80 per cent in some sectors and localities. Since then there has been a steady recovery in the number of jobs being advertised online but this recovery is uneven between different sectors and different cities and regions.

As examples offers of employment in the food and hospitality. Industries remain dire and aerospace is also still badly hit. On the other hand, job advert volumes in manufacturing have substantially recovered and, perhaps understandably there is an increase in jobs adverts in health care.

There is considerable differences as to how far the volume of job adverts has recovered (or otherwise) in different cities. In general, it would appear that those cities with the largest percentage of office work and of commuters are doing worse: London in particular.

One area of the labour market that Emsi is focusing on is skills demand. They have developed their own skills directory, which Duncan Brown said, now contains over 3000 skills and are running a project funded by Nesta to see if these skills can be clustered around different occupations. Yet despite the so-called pivot to skills, he said there few signs that employers were. Moving away from the traditional emphasis on qualifications. However, qualification demands often did not appear in job adverts but rather tended to be assumed by both employers and job applicants. For instance, someone applying for a job as an accountant would presume that they needed formal qualifications.

Although there have long been predictions over the impact of automation and AI on employment, Duncan Brown said there was little evidence of this. His feeling is that, at least in the UK, the existence of relatively cheap labour in many sectors where it would be relatively easy to automate tasks, was a disincentive to the necessary investment. He thought that labour costs may have been kept down by immigration. He pointed to car washes as an example of an area where far from advancing automation had actually gone backwards.

The slides from the presentation and a recording of the webinar will be available from 27 August on the Association of Colleges website.

The job markets were already looking problematic at the start of the year. Researchers and policy makers alike were warning that automation and Artificial Intelligence were leading to changes in the tasks undertaken in different occupations, requiring new skills and competences. Employment in some occupations were threatened by these developments. This was resulting in the need for enhanced Careers Advice, Information and Guidance, in particular ensuring that adults has access to such services to help them transition to new jobs.

Now this has been amplified by the Covid019 pandemic. Many people’s jobs are furloughed, others have lost their jobs. The prospects for young people and graduates entering the labour market are particularly grim.

From 20 – 22 October DMH Associates are organizing a major online conference looking at these issues and more.

The conference web site explains that the world has experienced major economic, social and technology impacts. Societies everywhere are undergoing deep transformation.

Climate change, an ageing workforce and skills gaps are major issues that governments need to address. Only time will tell what the impact of the current health crisis will have in the medium and long-term. As a consequence, careers will evolve in response to a dynamically changing environment. How will this affect jobs, training, employment, the gig economy and/or unemployment in the future? We will be exploring forward-thinking approaches to careers support systems drawing on international good and interesting policies and practices.

For leaders, educators, career development, HR and employment specialists a fundamental question is: – how best can individuals be better prepared to adapt and prosper through lifelong learning and work? Individuals’ must be well equipped with the mindsets and tools they need to find and benefit from purposeful learning and work opportunities. Organisations working with young people and/or adults in differing contexts will need agile responses to meet citizens’ needs.

With all this in mind, time away to network with experts and like-minded colleagues is just what the doctor ordered. This year’s theme is Evolving Careers. Delegates will learn from experts and peers whilst sharing experiences, research and best practice to take back to the day job of helping to transform people’s lives.

The conference content includes international keynote speakers and breakout sessions hosted by leading experts and contributors

Session topics include:

• Career-related learning in primary schools
• An evolving curriculum in secondary, tertiary, vocational education and training (VET) and higher education settings
• Future scoping careers
• Digital innovations
• Building Partnerships
• How to Make a Difference to Those That Need Support Most
• Youth Transitions: Creating Pathways to Success
• Adults in the workplace
• Labour markets: where next?
• Tackling unemployment
• Lifelong guidance
• Social inclusion

Registration for the conference costs £25. There are already 210 delegates registered to attend from the UK, Ireland, Canada, Dubai, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, The Netherlands, Turkey and the USA.

katielwhite91 (CC0), Pixabay

Even before the COVIP 19 crisis and the consequent looming economic recession labour market researchers and employment experts were concerned at the prospects for the future of work due to automation and Artificial Intelligence.

The jury is still out concerning the overall effect of automation and AI on employment numbers. Some commentators have warned of drastic cuts in jobs, more optimistic projections have speculated that although individual occupations may suffer, the end effect may even be an increase in employment as new occupations and tasks emerge.

There is however general agreement on two things. The first is that there will be disruption to may occupations, in some cases leasing to a drastic reduction in the numbers employed and that secondly the tasks involved in different occupations will change.

In such a situation it is necessary to provide pathways for people from jobs at risk due to automation and AI to new and hopefully secure employment. In the UK NESTA are running the CareerTech Challenge programme, aimed at using technology to support the English Government’s National Retraining Scheme. In Canada, the Brookfield Institute has produced a research report ‘Lost and Found, Pathways from Disruption to Employment‘, proposing a framework for identifying and realizing opportunities in areas of growing employment, which, they say “could help guide the design of policies and programs aimed at supporting mid-career transitions.”

The framework is based on using Labour Market Information. But, as the authors point out, “For people experiencing job loss, the exact pathways from shrinking jobs to growing opportunities are not always readily apparent, even with access to labour market information (LMI).”

The methodology is based on the identification of origin occupations and destination occupations. Origin occupations are jobs which are already showing signs of employment. Decline regardless of the source of th disruption. Destination jobs are future orientated jobs into which individuals form an origin occupation can be reasonably expected to transition. They are growing, competitive and relatively resilient to shocks.

Both origin and destination occupations are identified by an analysis of employment data.

They are matched by analysing the underlying skills, abilities, knowledge, and work activities they require. This is based on data from the O*Net program. Basically, the researchers were looking for a high 80 or 90 per cent match. They also were looking for destination occupations which would include an increase in pay – or at least no decrease.

But even then, some qualitative analysis is needed. For instance, even with a strong skills match, a destination occupation might require certification which would require a lengthy or expensive training programme. Thus, it is not enough to rely on the numbers alone. Yet od such pathways can be identified then it could be possible to provide bespoke training programmes to support people in moving between occupations.

The report emphasises that skills are not the only issue and discusses other factors that affect a worker’s journey, thereby, they say “grounding the model in practical realities. We demonstrate that exploring job pathways must go beyond skills requirements to reflect the realities of how people make career transitions.”

These could include personal confidence or willingness or ability to move for a new job. They also include the willingness of employers to look beyond formal certificates as the basis for taking on new staff.

The report emphasises the importance of local labour market information. That automation and AI are impacting very differently in different cities and regions is also shown in research from both Nesta and the Centre for Cities in the UK. Put quite simply in some cities there are many jobs likely to be hard hit by automation and AI, in other cities far less. Of course, such analysis is going to be complicated by COVID 19. Cities, such as Derby in the UK, have a high percentage of jobs in the aerospace industry and these previously seemed relatively secure: this is now not so.

In this respect there is a problem with freely available Labour Market Information. The Brookfield Institute researchers were forced to base their work on the Canadian 2006 and 2016 censuses which as they admit was not ideal. Tn the UK data on occupations and employment from the Office of National Statistics is not available at a city level and it is very difficult to match up qualifications to employment. If similar work is to be undertaken in the UK, there will be a need for more disaggregated local Labour Market Information, some of it which may already be being collected through city governments and Local Economic Partnerships.

mohamed_hassan (CC0), Pixabay

Pontydysgu is very happy to be part of a consortium, led by DMH Associates, selected as a finalist for the CareerTech Challenge Prize!

The project is called CareerChat and the ‘pitch’ video above expalisn the ideas behind the project. CareerChat is a chatbot providing a personalised, guided career journey experience for working adults aged 24 to 65 in low skilled jobs in three major cities: Bristol, Derby and Newcastle. It offers informed, friendly and flexible high-quality, local contextual and national labour market information including specific course/training opportunities, and job vacancies to support adults within ‘at risk’ sectors and occupations

CareerChat incorporates advanced AI technologies, database applications and Natural Language Processing and can be accessed on computers, mobile phones and devices. It allows users to reflect, explore, find out and identify pathways and access to new training and work opportunities.

Nesta is delivering the CareerTech Challenge in partnership with the Department for Education as part of their National Retraining Scheme

• Nesta research suggests that more than six million people in the UK are currently employed in occupations that are likely to radically change or entirely disappear by 2030 due to automation, population aging, urbanisation and the rise of the green economy.
• In the nearer-term, the coronavirus crisis has intensified the importance of this problem. Recent warnings suggest that a prolonged lockdown could result in 6.5 million people losing their jobs. [1] Of these workers, nearly 80% do not have a university degree. [2]
• The solutions being funded through the CareerTech Challenge are designed to support people who will be hit the hardest by an insecure job market over the coming years. This includes those without a degree, and working in sectors such as retail, manufacturing, construction and transport.

You can find out more information about the programme here: https://www.nesta.org.uk/project/careertech-challenge/ and email Graham Attwell directly if you would like to know more about the CareerChat project