UK Business Information / Workforce Skills

Imperative when choosing a location for your business is ensuring your desired region has skilled staff, qualified to perform the myriad tasks involved in making a company successful. This section of the website will better enable you to understand the distribution of workforce skills among different regions of the UK.

There is a separate section for each UK region, detailing the primary skills of its workforce. It should be borne in mind that this is an overview. Small pockets of skills exist, under the radar in each region of the UK. The individual sections are aimed at helping you build-up an overall impression of which region has the workforce skills most closely aligned to your business needs.

Each section details what percentage of the region's population has achieved NVQ level 4 or above. NVQ level 4 is the equivalent of the High School Certificate or International Baccalaureate and gives a marker of the level of education across a region. A table is provided in each section, giving a breakdown of employee numbers for the following industries: Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing; Energy, Mining and Water Supplies; Manufacturing; Construction; Distribution, Transport, Finance and Business services; and Education, Health, Public administration and Other services. A summary below the table provides specifics relating to the primary industries of that particular region.

One important thing to note in the data is the number of people involved in public administration. Consistently high across all regions of the UK this is a legacy of the recently ousted Labour government's 13 years in power. However, a major policy issue of the incoming Conservative government is to scale back the UK's public sector, indicating each region will see a significant decrease in the number of public servants, over the coming years. Many of these employees are expected to find employment in the private sector, with 'business services' seemingly the most likely to be bolstered.