Future Skills Program will help workers and support the transition to a low-carbon economy
Meeting the needs of rapidly decarbonizing our society and upgrading backward communities will require a revolution in education, training and skills upgrading. Skills and capabilities are currently a binding constraint on decarbonization programs (such as building renovation), and differences in access to training opportunities are a key driver of regional inequality. If there is no ambitious retraining plan, the upgrade will link the community with the old high-carbon industries, making the blocked workforce possible to be retained by the next generation.
A key goal of the government should be to have a workforce that can withstand more economic shocks (such as those caused by epidemics and climate change) while helping all economic sectors to decarbonize quickly. But so far, the UK’s skills policy is not enough to deal with the urgency and scale of future challenges, especially after the austerity measures of the UK’s skills upgrading infrastructure led to a decade of disintegration.
Our proposal to solve the skill challenge is for a new Future Skills Plan The main goal is to improve and retrain the British workforce in jobs that are vulnerable to disruption and economic restructuring. We believe that it is better to provide training support to people while they are working rather than after they are unemployed, because this helps maintain workers’ confidence and work preparation. The plan builds on the European short-term work plan recently advocated by the Trade Union Conference (TUC), but we recommend that skills enhancement and retraining are at the core of such policies.
Our Future Skills Plan plan solves the dual challenges of skill improvement and income security. It provides a cost-effective mechanism for employers who obtain skills upgrading and income support during turbulent times; employees work part-time and receive stable income while receiving fully funded training; the government sees the realization of high skills, high productivity and low carbon Progress in economic goals.
We estimate that for 100,000 workers participating in the program from a range of target industries, our proposal could cost as much as 26 million pounds per month. When we came out of the pandemic, we thought it was a small price to pay for a more flexible and skilled workforce.
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