With investment in skills being primarily targeted at those under 24, and a rapidly changing economy, the prospects are high of there not being enough highly-skilled people to do the nation’s jobs. Tom Stannard explores the problem.

One of the most pressing facts facing local economic development plans in the skills arena is that investment in skills is very heavily focused on young adults, at the expense of people over the age of 24. Investment in 18 to 23-year-olds prioritises higher education at the expense of other types of learning and skills or those not in learning. Educational outcomes are still too strongly correlated with socio-economic factors and the truth for many people is that ‘if at first you don’t succeed in education, then you don’t succeed’.

Our economy will have 13.5,000,000 job vacancies in the next decade but with only 7,000,000 young people entering the labour force in that period, we are heading for a major labour market imbalance. Tackling the skills and employment support needs of UK adults is therefore now a pressing economic necessity and sustainable recovery is dependent on more UK adults participating successfully in the labour market and doing so later into their lives.