Human Capital

To bridge the skills gap and ready ourselves for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we need to ‘Level Up’ our relationship with education and training. This means fresh thinking around STEM education and the process of obtaining credentials regardless of age, or socio-economic background, widening the relevance of apprenticeships, work placements, and bringing private sector requirements into a more flexible system of teaching with a direct vocational pathway to hi-tec employment.

Automation, digitisation, and the computerisation of jobs is a moment of opportunity rather than alarm if the rigidity of the education system is addressed early. Students still in schooling must be made aware through careers advice of the relevance of highly-skilled digital jobs, like computer science and coding, while those seeking a transition to future-proof their skillset must be able to do so without substantial trade-offs in their living conditions or displacement from their current work. ‘Micro-credentials’, foundational degrees, and retraining programmes in collaboration with higher education providers are some of the ways in which this shift to a more knowledge-based economy is already occurring in the Oxford-Cambridge Arc.