How employer data can support regional training, aligned with national skills’ requirements

As Skills England sets out to reshape the national skills system, a key success factor will be the ability to identify and respond to region-specific skills shortages by education providers. This newly established governmental body is tackling a decades-old problem: the skills system being out of sync with the reality of employer demand. But in order to fulfil this mission, the education sector will need access to accurate, timely data about employers and businesses, to reflect the real nature of the labour market. Here, Adam Herbert shares how accurate employer data can help drive this shift.

By using marketing tech companies, employers and educators can access, interpret and utilise accurate business data to help shape policy, skills investment, and training at a regional level.

Too much of the current system is driven by hindsight and guesswork. The future should be powered by live signals, intent indicators, and actual hiring behaviour – not outdated proxies. Accurate data will allow for segmentation by industry, size, turnover, location, as well as hiring activity, in order to align with the national skills system overhaul.

Using accurate data allows education and policy organisations to create maps of business demand across sectors, ranging from engineering to finance, logistics to digital, including those identified as being critical, in terms of certain skills’ shortages. Companies that are actively hiring for certain roles can be identified, or those struggling to fill vacancies, so education and industry can respond effectively.

Helping education providers to support Skills England’s national mission

Skills England’s mission is to bring together government, employers, and education providers to ensure training provision matches the economic needs of the country. But for local training providers and FE colleges to respond to that, they must first know what those needs are, including where the gaps lie on a micro level, which businesses are hiring, and what roles are going unfilled.

By using accurate data, it’s possible to segment employer needs not only by region, but also by sector and business size. This is, in fact, essential because identifying the training needs for a small logistics hub in the Midlands is a different challenge from the needs of high-growth biotech firms in the Southeast.

Local colleges and apprenticeship planning

For education providers looking to play a meaningful role in the regional skills shortages, measurables need to be implemented. Take, for example, a college in Yorkshire hoping to boost its apprenticeship uptake. Without reliable insight into local employer demand, the best they can do is guess. But if you start mapping business needs, not just nationally, but postcode by postcode, you’ll uncover a much more precise, localised demand. This kind of data allows colleges to provide laser-focused training that actually leads to employment.

Another example is if 100 nearby firms are actively recruiting for Level 3 technical roles, and most of them are SMEs in the manufacturing sector, struggling to find candidates with the right mix of hands-on skills and digital knowledge. That insight will become key to collaborating and highlight a clear case for creating apprenticeships that genuinely meet local workforce needs.

Shaping the future of skills

From economic uncertainty, digital transformation and specific sector challenges, the employment outlook is changing faster than ever. The UK is at a turning point – and if we want a future-ready workforce, we need future-ready data. What’s essential is a measurable approach, which addresses the needs of employers, supported by higher education providers.

By combining data intelligence with collaboration across the public and private sectors, higher education can create training programmes that help fill vacancies, build careers and communities, and maintain competitiveness and sustainability within business and industry.

By Adam Herbert, Go Live Data CEO.