What Works to Improve Young People’s Essential Employment Skills?

Young people not in education, employment or training have often missed out on opportunities to develop essential employment skills. The Nuffield Foundation has launched a new fund to evaluate interventions and build evidence about what works to support young people to develop these skills and access good jobs.

Ask employers what young people need to succeed at work and the answer rarely stops at qualifications or technical knowledge. Employers emphasise the importance of skills such as communication, teamwork, problem solving and adaptability.

These ‘essential employment skills’ help people navigate workplaces, collaborate with colleagues, learn new tasks and respond to change. The Skills Imperative 2035 programme showed that in a labour market shaped by new technologies, economic uncertainty and longer working lives, they matter more than ever.

Indeed, the new standardised list of skills required for UK occupations includes them as core competencies. Yet, with the rising rates of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET), concerns about young people’s preparedness for work are widespread. Employers repeatedly report that too many young people leave education without the employability skills they need, a challenge compounded by the lasting effects of the pandemic, rising mental ill health and persistent school absence.

Through the Grown up? Journeys to adulthood programme, we heard directly from young people about how low confidence, anxiety and other challenges can make the transition into work more difficult. While the problem is clear, the solution is not. Alan Milburn’s diagnostic review highlighted the failure of the current system to support young people’s transition into work. Yet efforts to address these challenges are hampered by a lack of robust evidence about what works across education, training, youth services and employment programmes.

With renewed policy attention on supporting young people into work, it is important that future investment is guided by evidence rather than assumption.

Too many young people are missing out

Educational attainment and transitions into work are shaped by inequality. Young people with disabilities or health conditions, those with lower levels of educational attainment, care-experienced young people, and those from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to be NEET and to remain out of work and education for extended periods. Research suggests these young people often also have fewer opportunities to develop essential employment skills. Young people from lower-income families are less likely to participate in music, sport, arts and other enrichment activities that help develop confidence, communication and teamwork. They are also less likely to access high quality work experience opportunities. Over time, unequal access to these experiences contributes to unequal work readiness. There has been growing recognition of this challenge across policy and practice. Schools, colleges, employers and youth organisations are placing increasing emphasis on essential employment skills, using frameworks such as Skills Builder that have helped establish a shared language and practical framework for describing and teaching these skills.

Importantly, there has also been progress in measuring essential employment skills. New assessment tools and frameworks have made it easier for organisations to track development and evaluate change over time. This marks a significant shift from a decade ago, when such skills were often dismissed as ‘soft’ and inferior to qualifications and technical knowledge.

We don’t know enough about what works

Despite these advances, a fundamental problem remains: we still know surprisingly little about how to effectively support young people to build these skills. Many studies report positive outcomes, but most evaluations are small-scale and lack the methodological rigour needed to determine whether the results were actually caused by the intervention. Robust evaluations using comparison groups remain relatively rare. The evidence becomes even thinner when we look beyond skills development to longer-term employment outcomes. Do programmes that improve essential employment skills help young people find jobs more quickly? Do they help them access better quality jobs, higher earnings or career progression? Which approaches work best for young people facing the greatest barriers to employment including those with SEND, disabilities or health conditions, care experience or socio-economic disadvantage? And which offer the best value for money?

These are critical questions for policymakers, practitioners and funders seeking to support young people most at risk of being left behind. Yet robust UK evidence remains surprisingly scarce. The Youth Futures Foundation’s review of youth employment programmes found that training in interpersonal skills can enhance job prospects. However, most relevant studies are from the United States. Without more rigorous UK-based evaluations, policy-makers and practitioners will continue making decisions with limited evidence about what works, for whom and under what conditions.

An opportunity to build the evidence

The Nuffield Foundation is responding to this need by launching the Essential Employment Skills Fund. The fund will support programme delivery organisations and evaluators to test interventions designed to help young people aged 16–24 who face significant barriers to work develop the essential employment skills they need to access good jobs.

By bringing together learning across multiple projects, we aim to build a stronger evidence base for practitioners, funders and policymakers, helping identify the approaches and system changes most likely to improve young people’s transitions into work. More about information about the fund can be found here.

By Josh Hillman, Director of Education and Emily Tanner, Programme Head for Education at Nuffield Foundation