Pearson’s Skills Report for Scotland

Skills Outlook: Skills Map – Scotland

Pearson’s Skills Outlook provides vital insight into the immediate needs of the modern workforce, to help employers and employees stay relevant and adaptable for the long term. We know that regional workforces are facing significant technological change, and localised insights can help us to navigate this.

Using Skills Outlook data, we have created the first Pearson Skills Report for Scotland, covering four regions. These are: Eastern Scotland, Highlands and Islands, North Eastern and South Western Scotland.

We explored which jobs are expanding and declining across different sectors. We also looked at the current skills in demand from employers, as well as those growing in importance. To do this, we analysed 1,783,681 Scottish job ads and matched them to 7,662 of the skills in Pearson’s proprietary ontology.
What we found is that, while there is certainly change ahead, automation does not necessarily mean fewer jobs – it means different jobs.

Our report tracks localised trending skills (including specialised) and popular skills over a four-year basis and then projects emerging skills which we believe may be in high demand in the future.

Download our report

Snapshot

In Eastern Scotland:

  • The most in-demand skills were communication, collaboration, interpersonal skills, attention to detail and maintaining cleanliness.
  • Emerging skills include Maintaining Alarm Systems.
  • Trending specialised skills include safety standards, inventory control and food preparation.

What can educators and employers do next?

The skills needed for work are in constant flux – people willing to learn and be agile and adaptable will have the greatest success. Targeted learning and development can equip your students or workforce with the capability to thrive, whatever tomorrow brings. Whether it's at home, in the classroom or in the workplace, learning is the key to improving our life chances. To this end, Pearson in the UK offers a blend of content, curricula, assessment, training and technology to make learning more engaging and effective.

To find out more about the above, our skill map capabilities, or if you have a question about our report, please email daniel.pedly@pearson.com or laura.coryton@pearson.com

The data we used

August 2024

Labour market insights methodology

Pearson created a labour market dataset from the UK census and Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, then mapped this to our proprietary occupations ontology of 5,600 occupations and 26,600 tasks. Pearson’s technological transformation models were then used to produce in-depth projections of the future of the work. Macroeconomic factors have been modelled by economists specialising in workforce dynamics, informed by industry-level statistics and projections from the UK government.

Skill trends methodology

We assessed popular and trending skills through the analysis of 1,783,681 Scottish job ads, collected from January 2020 to March 2024. This analysis leverages our proprietary natural language processing models, which determine which of the 9,000+ skills in our ontology are present in each job advert.