Skills Imperative 2035: Education Pathways, Skills Development and Occupational Outcomes
16 October 2025
Education Pathways, Skills Development and Occupational Outcomes is the eighth working paper to be published by The Skills Imperative 2035 programme, a five-year programme funded by the Nuffield Foundation.
It builds on previous findings from the programme by:
- Exploring whether people’s likelihood of working in a high-risk occupation varies depending on the ‘pathway’ (academic, vocational, mixed, or an apprenticeship) that they took through education.
- Investigating whether people’s Essential Employment Skills (problem solving and decision making; communication; collaboration; information literacy; creative thinking; and organising, planning and prioritising) vary, amongst adult workers and young people, according to the pathway they took through education.
- Exploring how people’s cognitive skills (numeracy, literacy and problem-solving) and non-economic outcomes (attitudes to trust and politics, patience, and volunteering) vary depending on their pathway through education.
It features analysis of data on people’s skill levels (collected through both the Survey of Adult Skills, and the NFER Essential Employment Skills Survey), linked to administrative data on the same individuals’ educational backgrounds and other characteristics.
Essential Employment Skills (EES) are a set of skills clearly identified in previous research for The Skills Imperative 2035 as especially vital for the future labour market.
Key Findings
The key findings from our research are:
- The higher someone’s qualifications, the less likely they are to work in a ‘high-risk’ (declining) occupation. However, college leavers who followed different post-16 pathways but did not progress to university do not differ substantially in how likely they are to work in a high-risk occupation.
- Whilst people with degrees are far less likely to end up in a high-risk occupation, a significant minority of them do, nevertheless, work in these occupations.
- Amongst those with a degree, people from lower-income households are more likely to end up working in a high-risk occupation.
- Individuals who follow an academic post-16 pathway tend to have substantially higher literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills compared to those who followed a vocational pathway.
- People’s levels of EES do not appear to vary significantly depending on the post-16 pathway they followed.
- Degree-educated workers’ levels of EES do not appear to vary significantly depending on the subject of their degree.
- Individuals’ EES do not appear to be significantly related to their literacy, numeracy or problem-solving skills.