Sarah Pemberton-Frings, from the University of Cambridge, explores what the UK Labour Force Survey reveals about unequal access to job-related training and the extent to which training is linked to better pay and employment opportunities.
The UK has a skills problem, but it also has a training problem. Employers report widespread skills shortages, yet investment in workforce training has weakened over time, even as demand for new skills continues to grow.
This raises a basic but important question: who actually gets access to job-related training, and does that training lead to better employment and pay?
These questions matter because training is often presented as the answer to labour market change. As technologies and policies shift, sectors restructure and some jobs become more exposed to trends like automation, workers are increasingly told that upskilling is the route to security and progression. But that promise only holds if training reaches the people who need it most and if the labour market rewards it in practice.
The UK Labour Force Survey
To explore this, we used the UK Labour Force Survey (LFS), accessed through the UK Data Service. The LFS is the UK’s main household survey on employment and work, and it is especially useful for understanding how training is distributed across different kinds of workers and jobs.
The analysis used two versions of the dataset: the quarterly LFS to examine participation in job-related training, and the five-quarter longitudinal LFS to explore whether training was associated with employment and wage outcomes over time.
This mattered because it allowed the research to look at both access and reward. The first question was who participates in job-related training. The second was whether that participation was linked to better labour market outcomes later on. Looking at both together is important, because training only works as a policy tool if it is both accessible and valuable.
The LFS was particularly well suited to this project because it asks whether respondents have taken part in job-related education or training in the last three months, while also capturing a wide range of demographic and work-related characteristics. That makes it possible to examine patterns by age, gender, qualification level, employment status, occupation, and industry, rather than treating training as something that happens evenly across the workforce.
What we found
The analysis points to a clear inequality in who trains. Occupations and industries expected to contract over the next decade, and which already face skills gaps, often have relatively low rates of job-related training.
By contrast, higher rates are more common in areas of growth. That is encouraging for internal upskilling, but it may do less for workers trying to move out of declining sectors.
Sector differences
These challenges vary by sector, so responses need to be tailored too.
For example, Health and Social Care exhibits high training participation, driven by regulatory requirements for professional development and few alternative employers, yet persistent shortages due to retention challenges.
By contrast, Skilled Trades and Construction show low job-related training rates alongside high skills gaps and vacancy shortages, despite ongoing initiatives, perhaps illustrating employer hesitancy over poaching risks.
Unequal access among at-risk workers
The findings also suggest that training is not distributed equally across workers facing labour market risk.
People with lower qualification levels were less likely to participate in job-related training, despite often being more exposed to the kinds of labour market change that make retraining most important.
Women and part-time workers were more likely to be in jobs at risk of automation, but did not participate in training at higher rates than men and full-time workers.
In other words, those with the strongest need for upskilling were not always the most likely to receive it.
Labour market returns
The picture on labour market returns was also mixed. For men, we found no statistically significant wage premium associated with job-related training.
For women, there was a small positive wage premium, but the finding was not consistent across years and disappeared when hourly pay rather than weekly pay was used.
This suggests that the economic rewards to job-related training may be modest, uneven, or slower to appear than policy narratives often assume.
Implications
These findings matter for policy. If training is concentrated among those already better positioned to benefit, then it risks reinforcing existing inequalities rather than reducing them.
And if labour market rewards are weak or inconsistent, then simply expanding training offers may not be enough. The design, targeting and quality of training all matter, as does whether employers and sectors create real opportunities to use newly acquired skills.
The research therefore points to a broader challenge for adult skills policy in the UK. It is not enough to encourage workers to train.
Policymakers and employers also need to understand what prevents some groups from taking part, what kinds of training are most valuable, and how the benefits of training can be made more visible and more equitable.
Further research is needed on the barriers that limit participation, especially for workers in lower-paid, lower-qualified, and more precarious jobs.
There is also more to learn about whether the benefits of training emerge over a longer period, or whether current measures of job-related training combine such different activities that they hide stronger returns for some forms of learning than others.
For now, the findings suggest that moving from learning to earning is possible, but far from guaranteed.
You can read about this research, co-authored by Dr Pemberton-Frings and Dr Ilie, in our open-access paper.
About the author
Dr Sarah Pemberton-Frings is a researcher from the University of Cambridge whose work focuses on education, skills, and employment transitions.
She is interested in how training, reskilling and labour market change shape opportunity, particularly for workers facing inequality or insecurity.
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