Skills at Work in Scotland 1997 to 2006 - Scottish Government

SKILLS AT WORK IN SCOTLAND, 1997-2006
8. CONCLUSION
8.1 INTRODUCTION
The Skills Survey series - carried out in Britain in 1997 and 2001 and for the whole of the UK in 2006 - offers a unique insight into
the type and level of skills exercised by workers. Before 2006 the number of Scottish respondents to the survey was in line with
the proportion of jobs and people living in Scotland. Cell sizes were therefore small, standard errors large and Scottish-specific
analyses were inevitably limited as a result. However, the 2006 Skills Survey contained a Scottish boost which added an additional
1,566 respondents to the 434 respondents contained in the British sample of 4,800. This Report is therefore based on the results
emerging from a sample of 2,000 respondents living in Scotland in 2006. Other area boosts mean that for 2006 as a whole we are
able to report on results for the United Kingdom from a base of 7,787 respondents. However, when making comparisons over
time we restrict our analysis to the Scottish sample drawn from respondents living south of the Caledonian Canal (a traditional
cut-off point used by market research companies) since previous surveys used in this Report did not draw their samples north of
this line (therefore most of the Highland and Islands region was not covered). Furthermore, our trend analysis is restricted to
Britain since, once again, previous surveys did not extend their reach to Northern Ireland and so for these results the total base is
7,289 respondents.
This Report has outlined how the skill content of Scottish jobs varies by gender, working time, occupation, industry and
establishment size. It has also compared these patterns with those elsewhere in the UK and it has - in so far as is possible
given the limited number of Scottish respondents to previous surveys - tracked how this picture has changed over the last
decade. The Report therefore complements other sources which mainly give the perspective of employers such as the National
Employers Skills Surveys (Shury et al., 2006) and the WERS/WIRS series (Kersley et al., 2006).
While the Report has presented several key trends and described the current distribution of skills in 2006, it remains in a sense
the ‘first findings’ from the latest survey. Several skills-related issues are still to be investigated in greater depth, and the data
offer considerable scope for empirical testing of modern theories about the evolution of employment and work. In this final
chapter, we briefly recap some themes that have emerged from this first examination of the 2006 survey data in the hope that
this Report - and the data sets on which it is based - will prompt a further round of research which is of particular interest to
Scottish researchers and policy-makers alike.
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