What Skills England’s new framework gets right on AI

Skills England published its Employability Skills Framework on 5 October.

It names thirteen skills needed for a first job, from leadership to problem-solving. For each one, it says what the skill looks like once AI is part of the job. For leadership, it says: “takes responsibility for decisions supported by AI and uses tools in a safe, ethical and responsible way.” The problem-solving line has “uses AI to explore options and solutions, testing outputs and using judgement to decide the best approach.”

In other words, the skill is not using AI as such. It is owning what you decide with it.

Skills England also says it will work with the Department for Education (DfE) and the Department for Work and Pensions to align their services and programmes with the framework “wherever possible.” That matters. School is where preparation for career and life should start, and DfE is the department that shapes what schools teach. A labour-market body bringing its framework to DfE is a step in the right direction.

But what do employers want? I have hired first jobbers for a long time, and some years ago we asked twenty-eight major employers, from Amazon to Jaguar Land Rover, what they actually wanted from them. The answer was not a list of qualities. It was for first jobbers to deliver real value to the organisation, more or less from day one. Employers don’t really want someone learning on the job at the company’s expense.

So while these thirteen readiness skills get someone through the door, what keeps them there is producing something a colleague or a customer values. A good AI user is a good employee; a good AI user who owns their decisions is better; a good AI user who does something the customer cares about is really ‘the thing’.

It’s helpful that the framework emphasises young people taking responsibility. It’s the difference between readiness and usefulness. And I believe in young people – they are frequently capable of bearing responsibility much earlier than most adults expect. In my day job teaching essential work skills to young people, including at a Jobcentre youth hub, I see them rising to the challenge when given the opportunity to be responsible for something real, often surprising those around them. The evidence they produce (video CVs, for example) is the kind an employer can watch rather than take on trust. It shows they can deliver, rather than just saying so.

The next question, for all of us, is how young people get the chance to practise that responsibility before their first job, now that the junior tasks it used to be learned on are the ones AI is taking on.

But here’s why I’m optimistic. What matters over the next few years is where human work stays valuable once software takes over a lot of the ‘doing’. For me, the answer is taking responsibility for the outcome. A framework that tells a young person not to take the machine’s answer at face value, and to own the decision they make with it, is onto something important. However work gets done in future, somebody always has to stand behind the end result, and that somebody is a person, not a piece of software. Skills England’s framework is a good start.

By David Jaffa, Founder of the National Talent Academy and author of After the Ladder.