One-in-four Jersey jobs obsolete by 2035

Monday 19 July 2021

Around one-in-four Jersey jobs will be gone by 2035, according to an independent group of Jersey’s largest employers who have set out recommendations for plugging skills gaps in time for that shift.

The Jersey Employer Group has concluded that 27% of all current jobs will radically change or be rendered obsolete in the next 15 years, and made a number of other key findings:

• "automation will radically change jobs across all of the island's major industries and so Jersey must take decisive steps to build the skills required for these evolving jobs;

• "education will require interventions in the education system. Work is already underway to embed digital skills in the curriculum, but it will be essential to build capabilities and mindsets that support the broader skills identified in the SWP throughout the education lifecycle, including apprenticeships, graduate schemes, and summer internships;

• "shared knowledge is already successfully being used to build skills, and Jersey's educational institutions can learn from counterparts in the UK, and tap into their resources and programmes;

• "retaining talent will require robust data collection on the students who leave Jersey for higher education - identifying and highlighting the courses that are attracting students from Jersey, will enable those education opportunities to be offered in Jersey, and so encourage them to stay;

• "partnerships between Jersey's major employers and education can be built to help develop future-focussed capabilities;

• "coaching and mentoring by pairing students with senior colleagues from across Jersey's main industries. This will help them remain connected to a specific industry and the island when they leave Jersey for UK universities;

• "and cross-industry mentoring programmes or secondments will build skills that are stronger in some industries and need to be developed in others - it will also encourage greater career mobility and development of transferrable skills. Each industry can provide alternative career paths by educating colleagues how their skills can be transferred from one industry to another."

To address the change, JEG are recommending a two-phased approach, which is set out in their ‘Strategic Workforce Plan’.

The plan recommends that critical skills are bought in from other jurisdictions in the short-term, and education and partnerships are used to develop skills and nurture Jersey talent in the longer-term. JEG encourages Government to factor the recommendations into immigration and education policies. 

They have now come up with three 'workstreams', which they pledge will turn into concrete actions at a later stage, based around education, coaching and mentoring future talent, and fostering diversity and inclusion. 

David Bailey, co-chair of the Jersey Employer Group said: “Our Strategic Workforce Plan provides an excellent foundation, and our workstreams provide the actions needed to implement its short and longer-term recommendations.

"We want to ensure that Jersey as a workplace offers the right career pathways and opportunities for current and future employees based on employer needs, and our group provides an ideal forum or ‘the voice of the employer’ to collaborate and implement change.”