About
The importance of work features in UK policy discussions about making work pay, providing greater security, treating workers fairly and creating opportunities. Improving working lives is also at the forefront of policies launched by the devolved governments in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and in regional authorities in England. The overarching aim of the Skills and Employment Survey (SES) is to collect robust survey data on the skills and employment experiences of people working in Britain into inform those debates. The series consists of eight surveys of workers that stretches back over almost 40 years. These cross-sectional surveys provide the means to chart and explain the changing pattern of job quality and skills over time.
Professor Alan Felstead has been a member of the project teams responsible for six of the eight surveys in the SES series and has been the Principal Investigator for three of the surveys conducted since 2012. The series is a crucial part of the social science research infrastructure which has enabled the wider academic and policy-making community to address evidence gaps in relation to work, employment and skills and has provided the basis for many publications. The academic importance of the SES series was recognised in 2014 when the UK Data Service selected the series for inclusion in the ‘curated collection’.
Featured Publications
Davies, R and Felstead, A (2023) ‘Is job quality better or worse? Insights from quiz data collected before and after the pandemic’, Industrial Relations Journal, 54(3): 203-222.
Felstead, A, Gallie, D, Green, F and Henseke, G (2020) ‘Getting the measure of employee-driven innovation and its workplace correlates’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 58(4): 904-935.
Green, F, Felstead, A, Gallie, D and Henseke, G (2022) ‘Working still harder’, International Labor Relations Review, 75(2): 458-487.
Gallie, D, Felstead, A, Green, F and Hande, I (2017) ‘The hidden face of job insecurity’, Work, Employment and Society, 31(1): 36-53.
Henseke, G, Felstead, A, Gallie, D and Green, F (2025) ‘Degrees of demand: a task-based analysis of the British graduate labour market’, Oxford Economic Papers, 77: 144-165.
Zhou Y, Zou M, Williams MT (2024) ‘Is there a mid-career crisis? An investigation of the relationship between age and job satisfaction across occupations based on four large UK datasets’, Socio-Economic Review, online first.
Documentation, Datasets & More
Find out more about this project by visiting the UK Research and Innovation Project Page.
