The ability to communicate, collaborate and solve problems are among skills that employers say they are looking for in potential job hires. In a major five-year study, the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) identified six key transferable skills that will count as much as qualifications in getting and keeping a job in the coming decade. It comes as NFER research, published last year, external, suggests it may become even harder to find a job as AI and automation could see up to three million low- to mid-level jobs disappearing by 2035.
As more than one million young people are not in education, employment or training - the highest level in over a decade - we have been speaking to businesses about how people can demonstrate the key skills employers are looking for. One of the big shocks for many leaving education and trying to get into work is the sudden lack of structure, so being able to prioritise your own work is seen by many employers as essential. In Leeds, Christian Townsley, the co-founder of the North Bar group, says working in a busy bar is all about staying calm and keeping a "cool head".
"It's important that you can organise, you can multitask, you can identify who's next at the bar and remember that," he says. Townsley offers trial shifts as part of the recruitment process, to give job seekers an opportunity to showcase these skills in action. "We'll observe them working with customers, working with the team, seeing how they fit in, seeing how they communicate," he says.
As people get promoted, they are expected to take on more responsibilities and be able to manage them within the role. "There's organisation, ordering beer, pricing beer, planning social media, marketing, recruiting," Townsley adds. Many employers want new recruits to be able to react to issues as they arise and take decisive action.
Maria Aderonmu went from a political science degree to a career at Morgan Sindall Infrastructure, a company that delivers infrastructure projects across energy, defence, rail and more in the UK. Now working in strategy, Aderonmu often has to think on the go and says "adapting to each kind of situation" has been one of the biggest things she's learnt through work. At university, she was involved in the debating society and now realises that has prepared her for thinking on her feet.
People director India Chaplin says she doesn't expect "every young person to have come across every scenario". Her tip is to think about how your experiences of solving problems outside of work - at school, say, or when you have been part of a team - could apply to a work setting. "There's lots of different ways that people can show the softer skills that we're looking for and how they would approach a problem, even if it was a scenario they've maybe not come across to help think how they would put that into practice in the working environment." General manager Jake Readman, from North Bar, says "developing communication skills" is key in a busy bar.
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