Sussex blazing the LSIP trail
For many years, Government has looked for ways to improve how the UK labour market connects job seekers with job vacancies. The results have been far from perfect. LSIPs seek to change that.
In September 2020, the Future Ready Skills Commission, launched by the West Yorkshire Combined Authority almost two years earlier, published its blueprint report. It made nine key recommendations, two of which influenced – directly or indirectly – the current wave of DfE funding for Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs) in England.
Recognise that areas are best placed to understand their own skills requirements and implement statutory five-year strategic skills plans to make it happen;
Ensure that training meets the current and future skills needs of regional labour markets, delivery agreements with skills providers should be put in place, supported by investment funding.
Source: Future Ready Skills Commission
The Green Edge has been delving into the LSIP Trailblazers and Strategic Development Fund pilots and we think the Sussex LSIP trailblazer marks a significant move forward in creating a process for improving the workings of local labour markets.
The Sussex LSIP trailblazer was developed between October 21 and March 22 and focused on five key areas: labour market, skills provision, sector profile, accessibility, and skills policy. The Sussex team’s initial work was informed by the usual surveys of almost 200 businesses1, but interestingly – and by no means all of the trailblazers did this – it also used near-real time labour market intelligence (LMI) data in its analysis. This LMI data came from Nesta’s Open Jobs Observatory (OJO), a pilot project that shares free insights on UK skill demands and ‘aims to be the UK’s first-ever open repository of information about the skills requested by employers in UK job adverts’
The essence of OJO is to identify the skills being asked for in all the online job postings for a region or area such as Sussex. It does this by starting with a reference ‘dictionary’ of standardised skills2 – in this case, Europe’s ESCO database – and then uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to help recognise the standardised skills written in different ways in online job postings.
Image: BMI
While the OJO pilot was funded by the Department for Education – kudos to DfE for that - it was in Sussex where OJO refined its algorithm for extracting data from the online job ads. So, Sussex was a key stepping stone towards Nesta’s vision for open-access OJO dashboards and monthly commentaries on regional skill demands.
We’ll come back to Sussex in a minute, but taking OJO a step further for a moment into green jobs and skills, Nesta has previously observed that “while there has been considerable effort to generate additional jobs in green industries, [UK Government] efforts have remained at a high level and have not provided the granular definitions3 that are needed to track and facilitate the green transition. Rich and detailed information on green jobs, such as common job titles and dense green job locations, are necessary to facilitate the transition to a greener labour market”. Consequently, Nesta has extended OJO into the first open methodology for tagging ‘green jobs’, using a broad definition including non-green jobs in green industries and green jobs in non-green industries. This is a major step forward, and as we wrote in last week’s post, it’s hard to combine the various green jobs datasets such as those from the NGA, JTJT, and the Green New Deal.
Returning to Sussex, the LSIP trailblazer identifies six priority sectors and their associated skills: for Engineering and Manufacturing; Construction; Digital (including IT and Technology); Visitor and Cultural Industries (including Hospitality, Cultural & Arts); Land-based Industries (including Agriculture and Viticulture); and Health and Care (including Bio Life Sciences and Pharmaceutical).
Image: BMI adapted from Sussex LSIP Trailblazer full report.
At least two of these sectors - construction and the land-based industries - also have specific green skillsets, and then there are the cross-cutting green skills around decarbonisation, retrofitting, net zero and business sustainability. And we even find a green annex in the LSIP - Annex 13 - that bundles in the Greener Sussex work done by FE Sussex, the consortium of Sussex colleges, and points it in the direction of the LSIP. Key areas here are carbon literacy and awareness, EV technology, alternative energies and hydrogen, green tech for land management and food production, and de-carbonisation in construction.
Now, we appreciate that the Sussex Local Skills Improvement Plan is just that: a plan. Execution will no doubt be long and involved. But on first reading, we think the work done in Sussex gives a good vision of a strong, sustainable future. It would be good to see this and other learnings from the LSIP trailblazers being actively shared with all of those charged (and funded) to develop their own LSIPs over the coming year.
Image: Nesta OJO
Meanwhile, further refinement of the Open Jobs Observatory by Nesta for both green and non-green skills jobs should be an important input into all the LSIPs now being developed. We think it would also be good to see a greater division between green skills and sustainable skills, as we reported in our recent Monthly Reports Roundup on the RAND Europe work for the DfE.
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It was good to see from the Sussex survey that green technology and decarbonisation skills were frequently cited as key skills for the next 5-10 years.
ESCO contains nearly 13,500 ‘skills’, which it then subdivides into ‘skill types’ [skills/competences and knowledge], and ‘reuse levels’ [transversal, sector-specific and occupation-specific]. We’ve always found this a little odd, but anyway, there it is.
We do note, however, that this might change as a result of the current ONS consultation.