Education & Skills 
The entry-level job market is changing rapidly. Automation is reshaping the nature of early career work, AI is altering what employers expect of new recruits, and the opportunities for young people to gain informal workplace experience before they enter employment are declining. Against this backdrop, the relationship between education providers and employers has never mattered more.
Yet despite broad consensus on its importance, meaningful employer engagement in education remains the exception rather than the rule. The complexity of making it work in practice, at scale and across a fragmented system, has yet to be resolved. Through the All Party Parliamentary Group for Skills, Careers and Employment, Policy Connect recently brought together parliamentarians, policymakers, education providers, and employers to examine exactly this question. The discussion surfaced several recurring tensions that sit at the heart of the challenge.
Employer-informed, not employer-led
One of the clearest areas of agreement was that employers cannot be expected to act as primary decision-makers in curriculum and qualification design. While employers offer essential insight into the skills their sectors require, translating that insight into qualification and curriculum design demands a level of technical expertise in assessment and pedagogy that most employers would not be expected to possess. A related challenge is that employers often find it difficult to articulate future skills needs with precision. Qualities such as curiosity, adaptability, and professionalism are frequently cited, but translating these into measurable, teachable frameworks requires sustained and iterative dialogue that the current system does not always support.
Co-creation, characterised by reciprocity and sustained collaboration, was consistently identified as the hallmark of effective engagement. Regional employer networks and collaborative models in which businesses work directly with colleges to co-design curriculum offer some of the clearest examples of this approach in practice.
Which employers, and on whose terms?
Effective engagement also depends on who is in the room. Apprenticeship standards and qualification frameworks have tended to be designed by and for larger employers, and the administrative burden of taking on students, from DBS checks to health and safety documentation, acts as a significant deterrent for smaller businesses without dedicated HR capacity.
Peer-to-peer approaches, where employers hear directly from comparable businesses about how they have managed these practicalities, were identified as particularly effective in normalising participation for SMEs who had assumed engagement was not accessible to organisations of their size. The Skills Commission’s ‘Earning or Learning: A New Agenda for NEET Reduction’ recommends a simplified, single-point employer engagement offer and clearer guidance for businesses seeking to support young people into work, a recommendation that resonated strongly with participants.
The challenge of work experience
If workforce readiness is best developed through encounters with actual working environments, then early exposure to the workplace is one of the most important points of connection between education and employment. Government has signalled a clear commitment to expanding work experience across education and training, but the administrative and logistical demands of hosting placements mean that this ambition is not always straightforward to realise in practice. Simultaneously, the fall in part-time employment among school-age young people has removed one of the most formative routes through which employability skills have historically been developed. Earning or Learning identifies insufficient employer engagement in education not only as a workforce quality issue but as a driver of youth inactivity, and recommends that the two-week work experience mandate be treated as a targeted preventive intervention for young people showing early signs of disengagement.
Concerns were raised about school capacity to coordinate work experience under the Government’s commitment to mandating two weeks of employer engagement, with a majority of schools reporting limited or no resource to deliver this effectively. Careers Hubs were identified as one mechanism through which coordination could be strengthened, with investment in their employer engagement function seen as more effective than distributing resource thinly across individual schools.
The question of incentives
Underpinning much of the discussion was the question of what motivates employers to engage in the first place. In some comparable international systems, participation in education is regarded as a civic responsibility embedded in business culture in a way that is not yet consistently the case in England. Participants noted that the current economic climate makes it harder for businesses to prioritise engagement that may feel distant from immediate operational concerns, and that the absence of meaningful incentives, financial or structural, remains a significant gap. Earning or Learning recommends that the Growth and Skills Levy be designed in part to reduce the cost burden on employers who engage with young people at risk of becoming NEET, and identifies Youth Guarantee trailblazers as a potential vehicle for piloting incentive models at a local level. Participants at the roundtable reflected similar conclusions, noting that goodwill and good practice exist in abundance but that systemic change will require the kind of structural and financial levers that policy has yet to fully deploy.
The conversation made clear that the building blocks of effective employer engagement already exist, in collaborative networks, peer-led approaches, and pockets of genuinely innovative partnership. What remains absent is the system-wide architecture to connect and sustain them. Translating good practice into consistent expectation will require clearer incentives, stronger coordination, and a shared understanding of what employers, providers, and government each owe one another. The Skills Commission’s Earning or Learning sets out a series of recommendations that speak directly to these challenges. The full report can be read here.
