[GB] National Employer Skills Survey (NESS)

Full name of the series in original language

National Employer Skills Survey (NESS)

Abstract

The National Employer Skills Survey (NESS) collects data about the skills of the workforce of firms in England. A separate, similar survey is conducted in Scotland (the Scottish Employer Skills Survey).
The survey has been conducted every two years since 2001. The survey was established because of concerns about apparent skills-shortages and gaps in workforce knowledge that were affecting firm performance in the UK. In particular, the Government was interested in whether these skills-shortages were dampening economic performance in the UK, and whether policy interventions were required to address these shortages.

The aim of NESS is therefore to provide Government with robust and reliable information from employers about skills deficiencies and workforce development to serve as a common basis to develop policy and assess the impact of skills initiatives.

The survey coverage falls into three major categories:

• hard-to-fill vacancies
• skills gaps
• workforce training and development

In addition, an annex survey was conducted, which collected data from firms about the cost of providing training (for example, fees paid to external training providers for staff).
These firm-level data can be combined with other sources of business micro-data, because they have been successfully linked to the Inter-departmental Business Register (IDBR). This allows observations to be combined with, for example, productivity data from the Annual Respondents Database, amongst others. This allows researchers to investigate the effects that skills shortages have on other areas of businesses (such as productivity, innovation, research and development etc).

Main Topics:
The National Employer Skills Survey has been designed specifically to provide robust measures, by sector and geography, of:

• the recruitment and quality of young people recruited straight from education (school, college or higher education)
• how many employers have difficulty finding suitably skilled recruits to fill vacant positions
• how many vacancies remain unfilled because of skill shortages among applicants in each of the major occupational categories; and which skills are in short supply.
• how many employers face skills deficiencies among their workforce; how many (and which) employees are affected; and the nature of the skills challenges they face.
• whether employers expect any of their employees to need to acquire new skills or knowledge ('upskill') over the next 12 months and the specific skills that particular occupations need improving or updating.
• the extent to which employers develop the skills and assess the skills needs of their workforce; and the extent to which such activities are a feature of wider strategic planning.
• employer use of (and satisfaction with) FE colleges, Higher Education Institutions and other providers of training and workforce development.
• employer expenditure on training and development (these data are gained through a follow-up survey with a subset of employers who participated in the initial NESS interview).
• employer awareness, current and future usage of and attitudes towards Government training initiatives.

The survey was designed to incorporate employers across all sectors of business activity in England. 'Employers' were defined as establishments (individual sites) rather than enterprises. Some enterprises may therefore be represented in the survey by more than one of their sites. The sample for the survey was drawn from Experian's National Business Database.

Geographic coverage

United Kingdom

Time method

Other

Time period

2001 => 2013

Types of available microdata

Consistency type

Access mode

Update date

15/09/2021