Advance Skills-First Together

Support employers and recruitment intermediaries to adopt skills-based hiring by incorporating appropriate skills screening and assessment into recruitment processes. Complement this with practical tools, HR capability development and professional guidance, so that demonstrated capabilities are more visible and recognised in hiring decisions alongside qualifications, experience and other relevant considerations.

Embed Skills-First practices into enterprise transformation, workplace innovation, work redesign and relevant business grant initiatives, so that workforce capability development is integral to business transformation. Organisations should identify required capabilities, enable employees to build and demonstrate them through real work projects, and recognise demonstrated skills through mechanisms such as the Careers & Skills Passport to support deployment, progression and mobility.

Provide firms, especially SMEs, with a structured Skills-First Enterprise Transformation Pathway that reduces pathfinding time. Support firms to diagnose workforce needs, map required capabilities, redesign jobs and hiring practices, enable internal mobility and skills-based progression, and measure skills utilisation, helping to embed Skills-First practices into everyday business operations.

Equip line managers and SME owners, supported by business advisors, with the knowledge, tools and practical capability to apply Skills-First practices in everyday workforce decisions. This includes leading human-centric work redesign and workforce transformation, assessing skills, conducting skills conversations, and making skills-informed decisions that shape how employees’ skills are developed, deployed and applied at work.

Embed Skills-First knowledge, tools and practical methods into the professional development of HR practitioners, career coaches, adult educators and training providers. Strengthen IHLs and CET providers to provide career profiling and coaching before programme enrolment, help individuals identify transferable skills and make informed learning decisions, and provide post-training support to articulate demonstrated skills and connect with career opportunities. Practitioners should leverage common infrastructure, including the Careers & Skills Passport, to help individuals maintain trusted, portable skills records across learning, work and career transitions.

Introduce scheduled career and skills reviews at key career and life stages for working adults, prompting concrete learning or career actions and tracking follow-through rather than waiting for disruption. Regular reviews can normalise continuous career planning, while employer recognition of demonstrated skills in recruitment, development and internal mobility can reinforce their value and encourage meaningful participation.

Embed a default prompt for individuals to review and update their skills profile at key career and learning touchpoints, such as when accessing career advisory services or enrolling in funded programmes. This helps keep skills profiles current and useful, while enabling individuals to make learning, skilling and career decisions based on an up-to-date understanding of their capabilities.

Support training providers to begin with diagnosed business challenges rather than a standard curriculum, identify the capabilities required to address them, and enable learners to develop and demonstrate these skills through real work. This strengthens skills fluency through application, while providing evidence of demonstrated capability that can be recognised in subsequent workforce decisions.

Embed structured work-integrated learning, including work-study programmes, internships, apprenticeships and industry projects, as a core component of IHL programmes. IHLs and industry should provide meaningful opportunities built around authentic workplace tasks and capability needs, while cultivating students’ mindsets to value these experiences for skills development, career exploration and lifelong learning. Learners should be able to develop, demonstrate and validate skills through real work, with demonstrated skills recognised, where appropriate, through the Careers & Skills Passport to support employment transitions and provide employers with richer evidence of capability.

Establish shared definitions and validation methods that distinguish verified from certified skills and support consistent recognition of demonstrated capability. Verified skills can be recorded through common infrastructure such as the Careers & Skills Passport, providing individuals and employers with trusted and portable evidence of capabilities that can be recognised across learning, employment and career transitions.

Strengthen the national skills infrastructure through a shared translation service that enables organisations to map the national jobs-tasks-skills taxonomy to their job architectures, supported by continuously updated skills and labour market intelligence, including Jobs Transformation Maps. Integrate insights on emerging and declining skills, job redesign trends and pay references linked to demonstrated skills to inform firm level workforce planning and transformation. The infrastructure should also identify sectors, occupations and worker groups most exposed to transformation, enabling targeted interventions, inclusive workforce outcomes and more consistent signals on the value of demonstrated skills.

Develop and publish a recurring monitoring approach to track the adoption of Skills-First practices and their relationship with individual, workforce and enterprise outcomes. Drawing on multiple sources of evidence, the Observatory can identify areas of progress and gaps, enable benchmarking and provide a stronger evidence base for understanding how Skills-First practices are taking root and evolving over time.