SPECIAL REPORT The Hard Truth About “Soft Skills”
Education gives young people the knowledge to begin. Employability gives them the confidence to continue.
Some people spend their careers talking about problems. Diane Vernon MBE has spent much of hers trying to solve one. As the founder and honorary Chief Executive of EmployabilityUK, and the driving force behind National Employability Week, she has quietly built something that deserves far greater recognition than it often receives. Her ambition sounds simple enough: help more young people leave education not only with qualifications, but with the confidence, skills and opportunities to build rewarding working lives. It is a simple ambition to describe. Delivering it is considerably harder.
If enthusiasm alone could solve Britain’s employability challenge, Diane would probably have cracked it years ago. She has enough energy to power half the National Grid and, judging by the people she persuaded to take part in Birmingham, enough contacts to keep the other half occupied as well. There is also something quietly refreshing about her approach. She is not interested in creating another annual talking shop where everyone agrees something must be done before heading back to the office to do very little. She wants conversations that produce action, partnerships that produce opportunities and ideas that genuinely improve the lives of young people.
That matters because Britain continues to face a challenge that receives surprisingly little public attention. Thousands of young people are classed as NEETs, one of those pieces of government shorthand that politicians and civil servants use without thinking while most people outside Westminster are left wondering what on earth they are talking about. Put simply, NEET stands for Not in Education, Employment or Training. Four rather clinical letters that disguise thousands of individual stories: young people whose education has stalled, young people struggling to find work, young people who may simply have lost confidence, and others who have never been shown the opportunities that exist around them. Behind every statistic sits a person, which is why EmployabilityUK matters.
It is not a huge charity with vast resources and an army of paid staff. Quite the opposite. It is a relatively small organisation, driven by committed volunteers, employers, educators and supporters who believe Britain can do better. National Employability Week, founded by Diane Vernon, has become its flagship initiative, bringing together employers, schools, universities, colleges and charities to ask one deceptively awkward question: why, after decades of talking about employability, do we still have so many young people struggling to make the journey from education into meaningful work?
Diane opened proceedings with a cheerful “Well done England,” acknowledging the latest football celebrations before quickly turning everyone’s attention to a rather more important contest. How do we improve outcomes for young people? Not simply by asking government for more money, but by thinking differently, encouraging fresh ideas and persuading organisations that rarely sit around the same table to work together. Like every conference, this one had its fashionable word. Last year, I am told, it was “momentum”. This year it was “collaboration”. Give it another twelve months and somebody will almost certainly invent “hyper collaborative ecosystem”, if only to keep management consultants in gainful employment. Thankfully, beneath the inevitable conference vocabulary sat something much more substantial.
Joel Blake OBE, Chair of Trustees at EmployabilityUK, captured that mood well. He spoke about collaboration not as another fashionable slogan but as a practical necessity. A relatively small charity cannot solve Britain’s employability challenge on its own. Equally, neither can schools, universities, employers or government. The only realistic solution is for each to recognise that they own part of the problem and therefore part of the solution. If somebody had shouted “synergy” we might have had a full house, but thankfully the discussion stayed just about on the right side of conference bingo.
It was Professor Edgar Meyer, Dean of Birmingham City University’s Business School, who then produced the observation that stayed with me long after the event had finished. We really ought to stop talking about “soft skills”. Think about it for a moment. What exactly is soft about walking into a room full of complete strangers and persuading somebody to offer you your very first job? What is soft about confidence, resilience, teamwork or learning to communicate with people twice your age? Employers repeatedly tell us these qualities matter every bit as much as academic achievement, yet we continue describing them as though they are optional extras rather than some of the hardest skills of all.
Professor Meyer also challenged something much bigger. Too many organisations, he suggested, focus almost entirely on what happens while young people are being educated. Far less attention is given to what happens afterwards. Education is not the finish line. Employment is. Even then, employment is not really the destination either. It is simply another starting line, another chance to learn, another opportunity to grow, another opportunity to contribute and, one day, perhaps help somebody else take their own first step into the workplace. His comments carried additional weight because they came from experience rather than theory. Arriving in Britain as a child refugee with little more than a few suitcases, his observations about opportunity and equity were rooted in real life. He also managed to squeeze in a football joke. Being German, he was probably contractually obliged to mention football after England’s victory over Mexico. His English, incidentally, was infinitely better than my German and, if I am being brutally honest, probably a touch better than my English as well. How embarrassing.
Former Perry Barr MP Professor Khalid Mahmood then took the discussion in a slightly different direction. Long before Westminster, Professor Mahmood had served a proper apprenticeship, working with his hands, getting them filthy on the workshop floor and learning a trade the traditional way. That matters because when he talks about training, apprenticeships and employability he is not speaking simply as a politician or academic. He knows from personal experience what good training looks like and what it can do for someone’s life. His challenge to the audience was both simple and uncomfortable: have we become better at counting activity than changing lives?
Britain, he argued, has become remarkably efficient at measuring programmes, budgets, funding streams, strategies and performance indicators. We can count consultations, partnerships, initiatives and enough spreadsheets to wallpaper Birmingham City Council House. If there is not already a committee measuring the effectiveness of measuring effectiveness, give Birmingham a fortnight. What we still struggle to measure is something rather more important. Are individual young lives actually improving? Professor Mahmood also argued that if a young person loses their way at school, the consequences can echo for years. Nobody should leave education without meaningful qualifications and a realistic route into work, while Further Education colleges often become the last chance saloon, giving people another opportunity to get back on track before confidence disappears altogether.
Employer Amina Hussain brought the discussion firmly back to reality. Academic achievement still matters and many major employers continue to look for outstanding degrees, but qualifications alone are not enough. Students who use university holidays to gain work experience, however modest, often arrive with greater confidence and a stronger understanding of what employers actually expect. Experience, she suggested, is often the bridge between education and employment. Tripp Martin, Head of Careers at the University of Birmingham Business School and, if you were wondering about the name, yes, American, reinforced the importance of work based learning. Delivering meaningful experience at scale is far from easy, but employers continue to tell universities that confidence, communication and adaptability remain qualities they value highly.
One contribution from the audience struck me as particularly honest. Work experience is wonderful, but it also consumes time. Every hour an experienced employee spends helping a young person is an hour not spent serving customers, producing goods, chasing invoices or keeping the business alive. Small firms feel that pressure more than most. They genuinely want to help, but they also have wages to pay, orders to fulfil and lights to keep on. That is a perfectly fair point. The equally fair point is this: if businesses want experienced young people, somebody has to provide the experience.
Which brings me back rather more years than I care to remember. My own first day at work was not spent behind a desk. It was spent in a factory, surrounded by machines I had never operated, tools I barely understood and skilled craftsmen who appeared to possess almost magical abilities. Looking back, I must have asked daft questions every few minutes. I almost certainly got in the way. I definitely made mistakes. Fortunately, the experienced men around me never regarded me simply as a nuisance. They regarded me as an apprentice. They took time to explain things, showed me how to use machines safely, taught me how to sharpen tools properly and helped me avoid making expensive mistakes. Occasionally the advice arrived in language colourful enough to make today’s HR departments reach for the smelling salts, but it was always offered for one reason: they wanted me to improve.
Looking back now, I realise those experienced craftsmen were doing far more than teaching me a trade. They were investing in me. They gave up their own valuable time, answered endless daft questions, corrected my mistakes before they became dangerous or expensive ones and, without ever using the fashionable language we hear today, quietly made me employable. That investment never appeared on a balance sheet, yet I suspect it produced a far better return than many of the machines standing on the factory floor. We think nothing of investing thousands of pounds in equipment because we can calculate the financial benefit. Investing similar time in a young person somehow feels less measurable, despite the possibility that they may spend the next forty years creating wealth, paying taxes, supporting families and mentoring the generation that follows.
Perhaps that is where Britain has drifted off course. Throughout the morning employers quite rightly described the skills they need: confidence, communication, initiative, resilience and problem solving all featured prominently, and nobody would argue with any of them. My only question is this. If employers want those qualities, are enough employers helping to create them? It is not enough simply to complain that young people arrive lacking workplace experience if businesses are becoming less willing to provide that experience. Schools cannot do everything. Universities cannot do everything. Further Education colleges cannot do everything. A small charity like EmployabilityUK certainly cannot do everything. At some point business itself has to accept that developing tomorrow’s workforce is part of today’s job.
That does not mean every employer suddenly creating dozens of apprenticeships. It might mean offering one placement, one mentoring opportunity, one careers talk at a local school, one week’s work experience or one chance. Sometimes one chance is all a young person needs. Government also has responsibilities. If tax incentives genuinely encourage employers to invest in training and produce measurable improvements, they deserve serious consideration. Equally, if public money is being spent, the public has every right to expect evidence that lives are improving rather than another glossy report celebrating activity.
The encouraging thing about National Employability Week was that very few people appeared interested in defending the status quo. There was a refreshing willingness to admit that old approaches are becoming stale and fresh thinking is needed. Sport was discussed as one possible route into employment because, whether we love it or loathe it, it remains one of the few languages almost everybody understands. Side hustles were mentioned as the modern equivalent of Saturday jobs, which is a very modern way of saying young people are still showing enterprise, just not necessarily while wearing a paper hat in a fast food outlet on a Saturday afternoon. New ideas were welcomed rather than dismissed.
In an ideal world, charities such as EmployabilityUK would not have to campaign quite so hard because employers, education and government would already be working together naturally. We are not there yet. Until we are, organisations prepared to challenge accepted thinking deserve encouragement rather than indifference. As one of the older models still wandering around the workplace, I freely admit I have a selfish interest in all of this. I rather like the idea of somebody keeping the economy moving, paying their taxes and ensuring my pension continues to arrive every month. Behind the joke, however, lies a serious truth. Today’s young people are not somebody else’s responsibility. They belong to all of us.
Diane Vernon and her colleagues at EmployabilityUK have started another important conversation. The challenge now belongs to the rest of us. We can nod politely, applaud the speakers, collect the conference programme and carry on as before, which is the traditional British approach to many national problems. Or we can decide that investing in young people is not an act of charity. It is an act of common sense. Education gives young people the knowledge to begin. Employability gives them the confidence to continue. If National Employability Week succeeds in persuading even a few more employers, educators, politicians and community leaders to act on that simple idea, then this year’s event will have achieved something far more valuable than hosting another successful conference. It will have helped Britain take one small, but very necessary, step in the right direction.