UK sees shift in favour of low-skilled jobs: Dr Craig Holmes

New research by Pembroke College Teaching Fellow, Dr Craig Holmes, into the long term pattern of job growth in the UK has revealed a shift more towards low-skilled jobs and less towards high-skilled ones compared with other European countries.

Dr Holmes found that, for every 10 middle-skilled jobs that disappeared in the UK between 1996 and 2008, about 4.5 of the replacement jobs were high-skilled and 5.5 were low-skilled. He argues that the reason the UK might have created more low-skilled jobs than other economies between 1996 and 2008 was because it was less costly to create them: flexible employment laws make it easy to hire people and the minimum wage is relatively low.

The research was reported in full in the Financial Times on 21st January: click here to read FT article in full