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Digital Skills

Working Paper 8: English approaches to digital skills policy – some reflections on current directions and developments

This paper provides a critical overview of the UK government’s strategy for addressing digital skill needs. It locates this issue against a backdrop of multiple policy challenges, including relative economic decline, flatlining productivity growth, the effects of Brexit and the issues thrown up by transition to Net Zero. One of

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Why the UK government is failing to address digital skill needs

What is the UK government doing to identify and address future digital skill needs? What follows explores what is being done and points to some of the major gaps that will need filling if a comprehensive and coherent policy response is to emerge. In 2017 the Department for Digital, Culture,

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Digital skills in lower skilled jobs

Workers in lower-skilled jobs are often seen as particularly vulnerable to automation as well as more likely to struggle with new digital skill requirements at work. With widespread concerns of growing digital skills shortages, and even a ‘digital skills crisis’, policy discussion focuses on ‘future proofing’ the workforce by retraining

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The curious absence of a coherent digital skills policy in the UK

The impacts of digitalisation on skills are, at best, muted in current UK policy debates. Given the importance of digital technologies, why is this?  What follows will argue that there are two key reasons.  The first is that we have many other labour market issues to worry about and these

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