Invisible skills: the gap in development and measurement
A recent briefing note from the Resolution Foundation reports that even when young people follow identical educational and professional pathways, attend the same university, study the same subject, achieve the same grades and secure the same job, those who encountered deep childhood poverty still earn around five percent less when a decade into their careers, equivalent to £2800 per year.
This unexplained gap signals that something deeper is happening beneath the surface that we are not adequately measuring or addressing. This blog argues that the UK is facing a dual challenge of both consistently focussing on the development of the invisible skills and systematically measuring them. Unless both the issues are addressed together, the disadvantage gap is likely to widen in the context of the future labour market.
Socio-emotional skills such as perseverance, motivation, resilience, self-control, social skills, and self-efficacy shape how individuals navigate education and work. A substantial body of research, including work by Nobel Laureate James Heckman and colleagues, show that these skills are as important as, and often more predictive than, cognitive ability for long-term earnings and employment outcomes. They underpin the essential workplace skills increasingly demanded by employers, including communication, collaboration, problem-solving, self-management, and adaptability.
Five of these essential skills (communication, collaboration, problem‑solving, self‑management, and creativity) have been identified by the NFER Skills Imperative 2035 as the competencies that will be most in demand in the future labour market. Notably, in 1998, IES developed an employability framework that highlighted the importance of foundational employability assets underscoring our long-standing recognition that such skills are central to labour market success alongside technical competencies.
In our current context, these skills appear more critical than ever since the labour market is increasingly rewarding the very essential skills that depend on socio‑emotional foundations. Yet a key problem is visibility of the socio-emotional and essential skills. Most often delivered as loosely defined “soft skills” provision and without any consistent measurement framework. These skills remain largely absent from administrative datasets and are inconsistently captured in programme data.
Without reliable, unbiased and standardised measurement, their role in shaping outcomes remains hidden, policymakers are likely to underestimate the importance of these skills, and this also means we cannot quantify their contribution not only to inequality, but to productivity and economic performance. This creates a fundamental policy blind spot: if something is not measured, it is rarely prioritised.
Historically, drawing on IES’s involvement in evaluating many UK training and employment support policies, a consistent pattern emerges that a primary focus centres on technical and cognitive skills. Initiatives such as Train to Gain, the expansion of apprenticeships, and more recent programmes like Skills Bootcamps have prioritised occupational knowledge and formal accreditation.
The government has taken steps to strengthen the skills system. The Skills for Jobs white paper emphasises employer‑led training, technical education, and digital skills. The Lifelong Learning Entitlement aims to make adult education more flexible. These are important initiatives. However, despite their strengths, they share a common limitation; and that is socio-emotional skills are often peripheral, loosely defined, and rarely measured in a systematic or rigorous way. This creates a critical gap considering the changing labour market dynamics. The current system risks reinforcing inequality, as employers increasingly prioritise essential skills that are rooted in socio-emotional competencies since the development of these foundational skills are often linked to early-life disadvantage (Treanor and Troncoso 2024; EEF 2023).
A more effective approach would combine structured development with systematic measurement. Policy interventions must embed socio‑emotional and essential skill development through structured, evidence‑based approaches such as the Skills Builder Universal Framework that has a clear and teachable progression for essential skills. Currently, there is no such framework for the socio-emotional skills. Secondly, a modern, fit‑for‑purpose data infrastructure should include a national framework for measuring socio‑emotional skills, integrated into existing administrative datasets such as the National Pupil Database, the Individualised Learner Record, and Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) through linked survey data. This would allow consistent, standardised assessment of socio‑emotional and essential skills across employment programmes and enable robust linkage to labour market outcomes, helping quantify their contribution to earnings, progression, job stability, and productivity. The challenge is therefore not choosing between development and measurement but recognising that both are necessary and mutually reinforcing.
There is also a pressing need to strengthen the evidence base on how socio-emotional skills develop over time, particularly in the context of childhood poverty. While socioeconomic gradients are well established, the causal pathways remain less clear. Understanding these dynamics is essential for designing early, targeted interventions that can mitigate long-term disadvantage.
If these issues are not addressed, the implications are significant. Individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds may enter the labour market with similar qualifications but lack the underlying capabilities needed to adapt, progress, and sustain employment. This creates a compounding effect, contributing to persistent inequality and reinforcing challenges such as rising NEET rates. The Milburn Review highlights how disadvantage shapes NEET status through a cumulative erosion of essential skills beginning early in life. These patterns underline a clear policy imperative that socio-emotional development must be in a structured way to ensure stronger participation and higher productivity in the future labour market.
We cannot improve outcomes without measuring them, and measurement alone is not enough without meaningful intervention. Unless the UK urgently begins to take an integrated approach, one that recognises these invisible skills as both measurable outcomes and developable capabilities, we risk deepening the labour market inequality and undermining the country’s productivity prospects, since the future labour market will be disproportionally rewarding these skills. We are at a point where these invisible skills must be given far greater priority than they currently receive.
Any views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Institute as a whole.