Welfare Reform Team Evaluation of European Social Fund pilot project 2014-2015

Customers gave lack of experience, skills, qualifications and confidence as barriers
to finding work:
• nearly a third (31%) had been unemployed for less than six months; however
more than four in ten (42%) lacked skills because they had been
unemployed for three years or more;
• a third (33%) of customers who identified themselves as lacking skills for
work said that they needed vocational training;
• nearly a third (32%) of jobs in Oxford are in professional occupations, nearly
double the 17% average for England 7 . Perhaps unsurprisingly, customers
with qualifications at Level 5 and above made up a fifth (20%) of the project
cohort;
• nearly a quarter (23%) of customers had no qualifications or qualifications
below Level 1;
• 15% of customers answered “don’t know” to a question about their
qualifications. The team collected no more data about this; anecdotally,
many of these customers had overseas qualifications not recognised in the
UK or with no direct equivalent here;
• more than half (52%) of customers felt that they had at best a 50:50 chance
of finding work in the next three months; nearly a fifth (19%) said that they
were not confident or were very unconfident about their chances of finding
work in this period.
The full results of these questions are shown below.
70
60
Duration of unemployment
61
50
45
Customers
40
30
20
10
18
10
12
0
Less than 6
months
6-11 months 12-23 months 24-35 months 36 months or
more
7 Oxford City Council (2015a). The Wheel of Work - Occupations in Oxford. [Online] Available from:
www.oxford.gov.uk/Library/Documents/Statistics/2015_03_occupations.pdf [Accessed: 25 November
2015]
27