Skills Imperative 2035

The Skills Imperative 2035 is a strategic research partnership led by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) and funded by the Nuffield Foundation which aims to identify the essential employment skills people will need for work by 2035.

As part of this, the Skills Imperative employment projections provide projections of employment up to 2035. This report provides a brief overview of the findings for Wales, taken from the employment projections workbooks produced by the Institute for Employment Research and Cambridge Econometrics as part of the project. The regional workbooks were funded by the Department for Education.

The projections presented in Skills Imperative 2035, as with all projections and forecasts, should be interpreted with caution and regarded as indicative of likely trends and orders of magnitude given a continuation of past patterns of behaviour and performance, rather than precise forecasts of the future. The reliability of historical and projected data will reduce with greater disaggregation. The projections were developed in 2021/22, at a time of considerable economic uncertainty following Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. Whilst changing patterns of employment by sector and occupation are largely driven by longer term trends, these circumstances must be borne in mind and the information used with caution. Whilst Skills Imperative refers to ‘employment’, unless otherwise stated this is the number of jobs. For this reason, figures in this paper for 2020 will be greater than 2020 Annual Population Survey or Labour Force Survey estimates of employment, as some individuals will hold more than one job.