Employment, Welfare and Skills
Understanding employment and skills issues for a fairer society
In the context of the current economic climate, understanding employment issues and raising skills are two of the most important challenges facing government today.
The new coalition government is keen to reduce the number of individuals on benefits and get people back into work. However, with significant cuts in public spending looming, ensuring appropriate employment opportunities are available will be vital to future economic growth and avoiding a double-dip recession.
At the same time though, it will be important to prepare for the future by raising skills and improving productivity to help build towards future economic recovery and a fairer, and more prosperous, society.
What we do
Ipsos MORI's Employment, Welfare and Skills team have a well-established reputation for conducting high quality research in this area. In recent years, our research has played a key role in informing policy development as well as evaluating what works on a range of issues such as work incentives and the role of government support in removing barriers to work, learner funding mechanisms and publicly funded training provision.
These are some of the many areas we conduct research in.
- Employment
- Welfare reform
- Pension reform
- Skills and Further Education
- Tax
- Innovation and business development
Our clients
We work with the main government agencies to help them understand these complex issues.
Our clients include:
- HM Treasury
- HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC)
- Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)
- Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS)
- Skills Funding Agency (SFA)
- Health and Safety Executive (HSE)
Our approach
We are experts in research methodologies as well as policy, and are skilled in using a range of approaches, from innovative qualitative methods such as ethnography, discourse analysis and citizen’s juries, to large-scale quantitative policy evaluations across a wide range of audiences and using a variety of methodologies.