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Professor Jenny Bimrose (IER) will be hosting the fourth Organisational Innovation ESRC seminar at the ¹û¶³´«Ã½ on 18 September. IER has organised the seminar on behalf of the Aston Business School. The seminar entitled 'Building skills at individual level: the role of workplace learning and national apprenticeships' includes a welcome from Professor Jenny Bimrose and Professor Helen Shipton (Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University). Professor Alan Brown and Dr Lynn Gambin, from IER, will be presenting alongside Professor Lorna Unwin (Institute of Education, University of London), Professor David Guile (Institute of Education, University of London), Professor Alison Fuller (University of Southampton) and Professor David Collings (Dublin City University).

This seminar will investigate how medium-sized businesses can realise the potential opportunities that modern apprenticeships offer, especially bearing in mind the Coalition Government’s intention to expand this provision, and will look at other potential sources of new skills, for example, graduate employment. For more information on the ESRC seminar series - Organizational Innovation, People Management and Sustained Performance see: .

A team at IER undertook a literature review and indepth interviews with key stakeholders on the use of migrant labour in low-skilled sectors, namely ‘construction’ and ‘accommodation and food services’, relative to other sectors of the economy. The study built on and expanded the existing evidence base focusing on the composition of the low-skilled workforce over time, a comparison of the different groups employed, and the characteristics of low-skilled sectors. The project report is now available:

Green, A., Atfield, G., Adam, D. and Staniewicz, T. (2013). . Report for Migration Advisory Committee (MAC). London: UK Borders Agency, Home Office.

IER and Cambridge Econometrics are currently undertaking a review of the literature looking at seven key methodological issues in estimating returns to Higher Education, Further Education and Skills. The project is sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).

As a part of the project, a one day workshop is being hosted at the ¹û¶³´«Ã½ and is being chaired by Prof Peter Elias (IER). A number of academics will come together to hear findings from the review and to discuss their views and experiences of these issues. The aim of the study and the workshop is to set forth recommendations for BIS (and others) to utilise in future analysis so that the estimated economic value added of different forms of learning are robust and representative of the true underlying returns.

Findings from Stage 4 of the HECSU-funded Futuretrack study are highlighted in a special issue of Graduate Market Trends (GMT), published by HECSU (February 2013). An IER research team, led by Professor Kate Purcell, followed the progression of the 2005/2006 cohort of applicants to higher education from application to graduation. Data from the Futuretrack study has raised important questions about the types of employment obtained by graduates, finances, career opportunities and further study.

Further details about the research can be found on the IER website at: , where PDFs of the project’s published Reports and Working Papers can be accessed and downloaded, as can PDFs of the online questionnaires used for each stage of the longitudinal research.

Professor Purcell notes: "This is the most ambitious and comprehensive research ever undertaken to explore the relationship between higher education and access to opportunity. The data we have collected is extraordinarily rich, the published reports produced so far only show the tip of the iceberg . There is much more to come..!”

If so, we would love to talk to you.

The Institute for Employment Research at the ¹û¶³´«Ã½ is doing some research for the Home Office on why and how different groups of people work in hotels, restaurants and fast food outlets or in the construction industry in the Greater West Midlands area. The experiences of those working in these two sectors of the economy will be compared and contrasted.