Abstract

Employers require their employees to have the skills required to perform their role within the business. Many employers, especially those who are small to medium sized enterprises, do not have the ability, or the need, to plan for upskilling their workforce over the medium to long term, focusing instead on ensuring their employees have the skills to ensure that business can meet the requirements of its order book, normally a period of up to 12 months. Central policy makers needs to provide a Vocational Education and Training landscape that forecasts the skills an individual will required in the longer term to ensure economic success. This leads to a tension, a tension that needs to be addressed to ensure the economy can continue to prosper and that individuals have skills required by employers over the long term.

The construction sector within the United Kingdom has one of the few active levy/grants schemes left in operation after the establishment of Industrial Training Boards in the 1960s. ConstructionSkills, the Sector Skills Council for the construction sector, is charged with the production of Labour Market Intelligence for the construction sector. The supply of robust and accurate forecasts of the types of skills and how business will change over a fixed period of time will allow employers to plan for opportunities that will arise within their sector. ConstructionSkills also provide a Vocational Education and Training landscape for the construction sector to allow employers to develop their employees. Many of the initiatives that affect the construction sector have been drafted by central policy makers who have sought to transfer policy initiatives from outside the United Kingdom.

This research seeks identify the networks at work within policy transfer and skills forecasting and assess the viability of forecast skills in a fast moving macro-economic backdrop.

Course: Master of Philosophy - MPhil

Date Deposited: 2017-05-10

URI/permalink: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/dis12877.html