Skills and Labour Data

How much will someone pay you for your skills? Is what I'm learning going to be valuable in the future? Which skills are in high demand or growing in demand?

This page is a collection of data from government and private reports to help you make sense of your skills. Not many students have access to this to guide their decision making - make good use of it.

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Nesta Report: The value of Skills

The chart shows the median annual salaries for each skill cluster in the third layer, as well as the lower and upper quartiles. These are estimates rather than precise figures, as only 61 per cent of adverts mention a salary. Despite this, these are the first estimates of skill values for the UK. To date, workers and students have had to decide between these skills without access to this information.

The five skill clusters at the third layer with the highest annual median salaries are:
- Data engineering
- Securities trading
- IT security operations
- IT security standards
- Mainframe programming

The five clusters with the lowest salaries are:- Premises security
- Medical administration
- Dental assistance
- Office administration
- Logistics administration

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Nesta Report: Growth in Demand for Skills

The chart below ranks the clusters in the third layer of the taxonomy, both by their value (salary) and by the growth in demand for their skills between 2012-2014 and 2015-2017.The clusters in the top-right hand corner of the chart have both relatively high salaries and high growth. They include data engineering, it security implementation, it security operations, marketing research, app development and web development. This may reflect a shortage in workers who have these relatively new skills.In the opposite corner of the chart are skill clusters with low salaries and low growth. Several require engaging with digital technology in a rather routine way, such as in shipping and warehouse operations, medical coding and administration and web content management.

Transferable skills are valuable, both to students, who may not have decided on a career path, and to workers, who can use these skills to transition between jobs. The data-driven methodology automatically identifies a set of 66 transferable skills prior to clustering, and these sit outside of the taxonomy.

FAQ

Question 1

Limitations of Nesta Report

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Limitations to consider

‍No taxonomy will be truly comprehensive, whether it is derived from experts or created from job adverts, and moreover there is no single 'right way' to group skills. In this research, the most important limitation to remember is that not all work is advertised online. As a result, the demand for skills used predominantly by freelancers or by casual workers may be underestimated in the taxonomy. Despite this risk, the data-driven approach still creates the most detailed taxonomy of UK skills available to the public today. And it is more easily updated than expert-derived taxonomies.