PROFESSOR DYLAN JONES-EVANS

During the recent Covid pandemic, various sectors were forced to change their business model dramatically due to the lockdown imposed on customers and other stakeholders which meant they were unable to trade normally. One of those hit hardest was the higher education sector with universities having to close campuses and move quickly to online learning in order to continue to ensure students were able to complete their courses.  Some have argued that online learning should have been implemented earlier with some predicting the decline of the current model of university learning as new providers could develop more flexible programmes at a lower cost to students.  To date, that hasn’t happened although the introduction of online learning may now have opened a Pandora’s Box which may prove impossible to close. From my own recent experiences, the pandemic suggests that universities have been largely ineffective at coping with the pace of digital change. Often, senior staff lack any...

During the last global recession of 2009, the group of individuals most affected by the labour market conditions at the time were people aged between 16 and 24, with youth unemployment in the UK going above one million during that crisis.  It was a pattern repeated in almost every nation in the world and whilst the global economy recovered, it would seem that young people, as a group, remain a vulnerable part of the jobs market.  According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), 13.6% of all young people (267 million) were not employed or engaged in education (or classified as NEETs) at the end of 2019, a far higher figure than experienced before the last financial crisis over a decade ago.  The ILO has also estimated that more than one in six of those young people working prior to the Covid-19 outbreak are no longer in jobs and those employed have had a 23% reduction in their working time. Within the UK, data suggests that there is still a significant group of yo...