Nuffield Foundation funds future of work research

The two research programmes will be funded from the Nuffield Foundation’s strategic fund, and will provide evidence-led recommendations for how to meet future demand for essential employment skills and promoting health and wellbeing in the workplace.

The National Foundation for Education Research has been awarded £2.5m for project called The skills imperative 2035: Essential skills for tomorrow’s workforce.

The project will identify the essential employment skills needed by 2035, such as creativity, critical thinking, teamwork, problem solving and resilience, and how these skills can be developed through the education system.

It will also examine any groups at risk of not acquiring these skills and who therefore face exclusion from the labour market.

The programme will run for five years, and will run in partnership with the University of Sheffield, the Institute for Employment Research at Warwick University, Cambridge Econometrics, Kantar Public, the Learning and Work Institute and the University of Roehampton.

The Institute for the Future of Work (IFOW) has also been awarded £1.8m by the Nuffield Foundation for a project on the future of work and wellbeing.

The IFOW research progamme will be led by Sir Christopher Pissarides and based on his Nobel Prize winning research on market frictions.

The programme will pilot a new, cross-disciplinary approach to evaluating disruption and reducing inequalities through better work, and will produce the first national disruption index to map and track technological disruption across the UK.

The IFOW project will run for three years and will be carried out in partnership with Imperial College and Warwick Business School, as well as policy makers, employers and other stakeholders.

Tim Gardam, chief executive of the Nuffield Foundation, said: “We established the Nuffield Foundation’s Strategic Fund to encourage ambitious, multi-disciplinary projects that would re-frame the social policy agenda in the coming decades, with a focus on increasing well-being and opportunity for the most disadvantaged.

“These two research programmes, with their complementary approaches to the pressing questions about the future of work and skills, have the ability to do that. Technological advances are potentially hugely beneficial for people and society, but only if we identify ways to ensure such benefits are equitably distributed and to mitigate negative consequences.”