Our Knowledge and Expertise
Employment and Labour Market Studies
Employment and labour market studies have been a long standing area of expertise for HOST. These studies are as diverse as the clients who commission them and they use a combination of quantitative and qualitative research to provide, for example:
- Studies of local and regional labour markets to support, for example, planning and demand assessment by service providers.
- Demographic and profiling studies of wider labour markets to assess changing patterns of skills and labour supply and recruitment prospects.
- Sectoral labour market studies using statistical and other methods to profile structure, trends and development issues in parts of the labour market as wide as Engineering, Call-centres or Construction or as specialised as Heating Engineering. This has included extensive work on skill shortages and gaps, and how these are addressed.
- Occupational labour market studies using similar methods and techniques to review the make-up, skills change and recruitment and retention issues within often very specific areas of professional practice, intermediate and craft-level occupations.
- Skills foresight studies – where HOST has been a pioneer-is developing and applying systematic methods to profile, for example, technological and skill changes and the implications for policy-makers, as well as employers and providers.
HOST also conducts themed reviews of employment policies such as active labour market measures, employment or resettlement of disadvantaged people and those at risk of unemployment. Studies have included research on ethnic minority recruitment and retention targets in the public sector (Home Office), restructuring enterprises and ‘active‘ redundancy strategies (Cedefop), innovation in guidance for the long-term unemployed (European Commission), active employment measures for resettlement of ex-offenders (SEEDA), impact assessment and active labour market policies (Cedefop); and numerous studies of local, and various sectoral, labour markets.
“I gained more knowledge about how best to gather information for research purposes and the limitations.”