Category Archives: Wales Wide Web

2012 PLE Conference papers now online

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In these days of repositories and Open Online Resources publishing should be easy. But it is still not so simple. For one thing there is all the editing and checking = for another developing / begging or borrowing the technical infrastructure.

The PLE Conference organisers are committed to publishing all contributions to our annual conference online with a Creative Commons License. And thanks to hard work by Carlos, Luis and Sara, the proceedings of the 2012 conference, held in Aveiro, Portugal, are now online here.

Check it out – if you have any interest in Personal Learning Environments you will find much of interest.

Only 15 per cent of UK companies offer apprenticeship training

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The UK Commission for Employment and Skills has published an interesting survey of Employer Perspectives Survey, the second in a series of biennial, large scale surveys of employers designed to provide a UK-wide picture of employer perspectives of, and experiences in, the recruitment and skills landscape. The draw attention to the following key findings:

  • There are perhaps unexpected signs of business confidence amongst private sector employers: almost half of establishments expect their business to grow in the coming year, and there is also greater confidence amongst younger businesses than older ones.
  • Employers typically use a range of channels when they are looking to recruit. They tend to make most use of private recruitment services which they do not have to pay for. Indeed, the single most common channel employers used to find candidates to fill vacant posts was ‘word of mouth’.
  • Candidates’ qualifications play a role in most employers’ recruitment processes and decisions, and a significant role for more than two in five. Academic qualifications continue to be better regarded than vocational qualifications.
  • Whilst the majority of employers train and plan their training there is a significant core of employers that do not.
  • Employers are more likely to provide training internally than to access the external workforce development market, although overall around half of employers do use external channels to deliver workforce development for their staff.
  • Employers most commonly look to commercial providers (private sector training firms or third sector providers) when they are looking outside of their own organisation to deliver training.
  • Overall take up of vocational qualifications remains at a steady level. However, there has been qualitative improvement in satisfaction with vocational qualifications amongst those employers that offer them.
  • Only a minority of all UK establishments offer apprenticeships (15 per cent). However, almost a quarter of those who don’t currently offer Apprenticeships expect to in the coming 2-3 years.
  • Employers are open to the recruitment of, or providing opportunities to, young people. Just over a quarter of all establishments, or 62% of those who had recruited, had recruited a young person in the previous 12 months. A quarter of all establishments had offered a placement to schools, college or university students.

A number of these findings appear significant. Employers still often rely on word of mouth – i.e. informal networks – when recruiting. And if qualifications play significant role for more than two in five decisions about who to recruit this means for three out of five they do not! The report also notes that

Academic qualifications continue to be better regarded than vocational qualifications and that when employers are looking to recruit new employees to key occupational roles, they usually anticipate that they will need to develop these new recruits’ skills, at least to some extent. UKCES report that employers are more likely to provide training internally (63 per cent did so) than to access the external workforce development market. Furthermore there is a wide sectoral variation in the provision of external training, ranging from 86 per cent in the Non-Market Services to 49 per cent in Trade, Accommodation and Transport sector.

Prospects for young people are problematic. “Amongst those active in the labour market in the last 12 months, the recruitment of young people was highest in the Trade, Accommodation and Transport sector at 71 per cent falling to between 55 and 59 per cent in all other sectors. This reflects the roles they are recruited to: 21 per cent of all employers recruiting young people reported that their most recent recruit was to a Sales and Customer Service role and 20 per cent to an Elementary occupation.”

Just 15 per cent of enterprises were offering apprenticeships. And of those that were: “Approaching a third of those who offer formal Apprenticeships (31 per cent) offer Apprenticeships that take 12 months or less to complete, and five per cent offer Apprenticeships with a duration of six months or less.”

All in all the report reveals some pretty big challenges ahead if the UK is going to develop an advanced education and training system, especially where employers are concerned.

 

Anonymising open data

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Here is the next in our occasional series about open and linked data. I wrote in a previous post that we are worki8ngt on developing an application for visualising Labour market Information for use in careers guidance.

One of the major issues we face is the anonymity of the data. fairly obviously, the mo0re sources of data are linked, the more possible it may become to identify people through the data. The UK information Commissioner’s Office has recently published a code of practice on “Anonymisation: managing data protection risk” and set up an Anonymisation Network. In the foreword to the code of practice they say:

The UK is putting more and more data into the public domain.

The government’s open data agenda allows us to find out more than ever about the performance of public bodies. We can piece together a picture that gives us a far better understanding of how our society operates and how things could be improved. However, there is also a risk that we will be able to piece together a picture of individuals’ private lives too. With ever increasing amounts of personal information in the public domain, it is important that organisations have a structured and methodical approach to assessing the risks.

The key points about the code are listed as:

  • Data protection law does not apply to data rendered anonymous in such a way that the data subject is no longer identifiable. Fewer legal restrictions apply to anonymised data.
  • The anonymisation of personal data is possible and can help service society’s information needs in a privacy-friendly way.
  • The code will help all organisations that need to anonymise personal data, for whatever purpose.
  • The code will help you to identify the issues you need to consider to ensure the anonymisation of personal data is effective.
  • The code focuses on the legal tests required in the Data Protection Act
Particularly useful are the Appendices which presents a list of key anonymisation techniques, examples and case studies and a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each. These include:
  • Partial data removal
  • Data quarantining
  • Pseudonymisation
  • Aggregation
  • Derived data items and banding
The report is well worth reading for anyone interested in open and linked data – even if you are not from the UK. Note for some reason files are downloading with an ashx suffix. But if you just change this locally to pdf they will  open fine.

Open data and Careers Choices

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A number of readers have asked me about our ongoing work on using data for careers guidance. I am happy to say that after our initial ‘proof of process’ or prototype project undertaken for the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES), we have been awarded a new contract as part of a consortium to develop a database and open APi. The project is called LMI4All and we will work with colleagues from the University of Warwick and Raycom.

The database will draw on various sources of labour market data including the Office of National Statistics (ONS) Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the Annual survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE). Although we will be developing some sample clients and will be organising a hackday and a modding day with external developers, it is hoped that the availability of an open API will encourage other organisations and developers to design and develop their own apps.

Despite the support for open data at a policy level in the UK and the launch of a series of measures to support the development of an open data community, projects such as this face a number of barriers. In the coming weeks, I will write a short series of articles looking at some of these issues.

In the meantime, here is an extract from the UKCES Briefing Paper about the project. You can download the full press release (PDF) at the bottom of this post. And if you would like to be informed about progress with the project, or better still are interested in being involved as a tester or early adapter, please get in touch.

What is LMI for All?

LMI for All is a data tool that the UK Commission for Employment and Skills is developing to bring together existing sources of labour market information (LMI) that can inform people’s decisions about their careers.

The outcome won’t be a new website for individuals to access but a tool that seeks to make the data freely available and to encourage open use by applications and websites which can bring the data to life for varying audiences.

At heart this is an open data project, which will support the wider government agenda to encourage use and re-use of government data sets.

What will the benefits be?

The data tool will put people in touch with some of the most robust LMI from our national surveys/sources therefore providing a common and consistent baseline for people to use alongside wider intelligence.

The data tool will have an access layer which will include guidance for developers about what the different data sources mean and how they can be used without compromising quality or confidentiality. This will help ensure that data is used appropriately and encourage the use of data in a form that suits a non-technical audience.

What LMI sources will be included?

The data tool will include LMI that can answer the questions people commonly ask when thinking about their careers, including ‘what do people get paid?’ and ‘what type of person does that job?’. It will include data about characteristics of people who work in different occupations, what qualifications they have, how much they get paid, and allow people to make comparisons across different jobs.

The first release of the data tool will include information from the Labour Force Survey and the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings. We will be consulting with other organisations that own data during the project to extend the range of LMI available through the data tool.

LMI for All Briefing Paper

The problem – a major shortage of jobs

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We are constantly being told that we have to improve our employability skills and qualifications for finding employment. Yet whilst more qualifications may help in getting a job, from a policy perspective if ignores the obvious. There is simply a shortage of work.

New research from the UK Joseph Rowntree Foundation explores the difficulty of job searching for young people seeking low-skilled work in three areas in England and Wales. Their overall finding is that the main problem for disadvantaged young people looking for work is fundamental – a major shortage of jobs.

Other key findings include:

  • Over two-thirds of applications (69%) received no response at all.
  • 78% of the jobs applied for paid under £7 an hour, while 54% offered the minimum wage. Only 24% of the vacancies offered full-time, daytime work.
  • In the weak labour market, 10 jobseekers chased every job compared to five jobseekers in the strong one.
  • Jobseekers who do not have high-speed internet at home are at a substantial disadvantage and can only search for jobs sporadically, rather than the daily basis that is required.
  • Applications sent a week after jobs were first advertised were half as likely to receive positive responses as those sent in the first three days.
  • The research found there was strong evidence that good-quality applicants from neighbourhoods with poor reputations were not more likely to be rejected by employers.
  • However, employers expressed a preference for local candidates with easy journeys to work.