There are Twice the Number of People to Available Jobs
Is "Upskilling" really the balm we think it is?
The reason I started this Substack was to write with full transparency about the struggle to find a job, as well as exposing the rhetoric of the press in response to this and other failures in the UK today. So this week when I was deep into the hedgerows of another weighty application after receiving two knock-backs, I took one of many, many Twitter breaks (the philosopher I’m currently reading advocates for the intelligence of procrastination, more on that next month). It was then I saw a #journorequest put out by The Big Issue:
As a Journalism student in 2012 - nascent in the workforce and full of expectation - I interned with The Big Issue. Compared to my second placement in a copywriting house silently coming up with the Sky TV manual descriptions, The Big Issue felt as authentic and involved as an office could be. I met and assisted vendors, I pitched ideas, I developed web infographics and was even sent to cover The Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Though Journalism as an industry was still reeling from the financial crash, The Big Issue office did what they could to equip me for something. And for that I’m still very fond of them.
It was with that in mind that I dm’d and said “It me” to the above request. Sometimes I feel like the urge to treat the world as your therapist gets stronger the longer you remain unemployed. It’s been about a year and five months for me. And it gets boring. People ask how it’s going, and you feel paranoid that they’ll think you’re a slacker, so you dutifully pick-up the overshare knife and cut yourself to show you bleed endless job applications. I was very cautious when Liam called me up to be sure to make astute, self-reflecting statements about the whole shitstorm rather than simply say “Stuff bad, I’m depressed”.
Straight at the top of the call he told me that The Big Issue had received statistics from job search engine Adzuna and the Institute for Employment Studies (IES). Both of these sets of data compared job availability before the pandemic - when, for every role they charted 1.2 job searchers - to the current scenario. There are now, on average, double the people searching for work for every job available in the UK. Liam highlighted that in some areas the skew is worse, with ten to one people for every job (I couldn’t find any specific links to the Adzuna or the Institute for Employment Studies analyses in the article, which you can read here.) No matter what you do to stand out, the job availability, and the odds, are simply worrying.
But stand out you must! You don’t want to be just any old Chad Applicant. I’m someone who has bags of degrees but not necessarily say, 10 years of professional experience. I maybe have around 3 years of collective experience in arts administration and freelance writing to present to employers, which in the past, would have been more than enough for the entry level jobs that I’m applying for. So I’ve been taking the government advice of “upskilling” to beat the competition, which as we’ll see, really means something else. I first came upon the upskilling buzzword in a Universal Credit interview last summer. Facing the spectre of the hospitality industry losses, I hastily studied on a TEFL course and made plans to go abroad to teach English. “Ah,” my work coach knowingly praised “you’re upskilling”.
At the time it felt like I was trying to secure a ticket off the Tory hellscape that is Britain as opposed to doing anything potentially beneficial to employers here. But I was happy to spin it that way to receive my survival tokens. Upskill is an ugly verb that we commonly meet in its gerund form upskilling, transforming it into a noun, a phenomenon. The first listed definition means to teach an employee additional skills, but the way it’s being used refers to an individual employee self-learning additional skills on their own time and dime. And this isn’t technically what upskilling is supposed to be. This is actually closer to reskilling, explained below:
Upskilling is the process of taking your skills and knowledge in a certain area to a new level, while the term reskilling involves learning new skills so you can do a different job. Upskilling primarily focuses on helping employees become more skilled and relevant at their current position within the organisation.
So upskilling is supposed to be about employers implementing training to help employees become more skilled, all while they remain secure in their employment. This allows employees to progress in their current role and continue to add value to the company. Whereas reskilling is when an employee’s job has become non-essential, and ideally the employer looks to retain the employee by training them in a different discipline. But in reality - as in the current scenario - the employee is let go and has to undertake such training and transfer of skills whilst unemployed and searching for work.
An employer taking care of staff to ensure their longevity and desirability is vastly different from those individuals being let go and having to try break into another industry, often with little to no money or time to do so. Take my example, where I used my last pay-check before unemployment to spend around £220 on a course to secure future employment in a different sector. That’s reskilling. Or when I spent £400 on pre-employment forms to hopefully move abroad for that sector. Those costs borne by the individual in the pursuit of a new role? Reskilling.
As a concept, I have no problem with reskilling. I actually think its an intuitive way to approach life, and I certainly live by the maxims of lifelong learning and adaptation to environment in principle. Reskilling at least holds the recognition that something has failed and is no longer an option, time to move on. But I have an issue with the government presenting upskilling as a solution to the problem. Entire sectors like retail and hospitality have incurred huge damage. The people expelled from these sectors account for this statistical doubling of job searchers. It’s like the government saying ‘Don’t worry, your local failing restaurant will hire you back and enrol you on an SEO course’. It’s just not going to happen.
Upskilling is largely a corporate priority to retain talent and proves cheaper than the recruitment process. It is something Amazon does with its employees, announcing a commitment of over $700M to its Upskilling 2025 program, an internal training initiative to promote customer satisfaction and worker advancement. But the recruitment crisis we have in the UK, with two unemployed people to every available job, is an entirely different beast. It’s been bothering mean that the term ‘upskill’ dominates the lexicon when it really doesn’t apply.
The solution of upskilling, as I see it, is a paradox. Employers, faced with an excess of candidates, are choosing those with higher years of experience in the role. Upskilling assistance might be a credible way to bring more people into this category. This is what the UK government’s Kickstart Scheme attempts to do, offering on-the-job training roles for universal credit claimants aged 16-to-24. But this won’t create anymore jobs in the long-run, it only raises the mean level of experience of applicants. It looks good on statistics; it removes a handful of people from the unemployed status for 6 months. But it does nothing to create new industries, new roles.
Much like the New Labour push to increase university attendees, the government are placing medals around necks whilst herding the public towards a cliff-edge. This is why, as The Big Issue article reveals, those on the other end of the bell curve with extremely high years of experience can’t get roles either. The fact that those with 12 years of experience are lucking out of roles too should speak volumes that there aren’t enough jobs. Plenty of people are skilled and applying to professional jobs.
Ok, say you do want to add to your skill level for your industry. What if you’re beyond 16-24 and can’t access the government loot box of extra months of experience? Well, there’s no available support. And that wouldn’t have helped much anyway. What that really means is we’re being left to our own devices to solve this supply problem. And I hate to say it, but I think the survival-by-multiple-hustles model is here to stay. So, a sort of multiple and complex reskilling. The problem of work is both economical and existential, and it’s not going away anytime soon.