9 minute read
Skills
INVEST IN YOURSELF with in-demand skills
Every business is only as good as its employees.
Since the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the job market, many employers have reassessed the skills and expertise they seek in their staff. As business goals evolve to ensure both short- and long-term success, so does the staff skillset needed to align with the new organisational vision. This has driven many people to upskill, retrain, or fast-track their learning to keep up with an ever-changing environment.
London South Bank University (LSBU) are proud to offer accelerated degree programmes at their new Croydon campus, shaped by leading academics to meet employer demands, and enable professionals to earn a degree in just two years, pay lower fees and launch their career sooner. Now more than ever, is the time for professionals to invest in themselves with the expertise that will make them
stand out in the job market.
So what expertise do employers value today? We will explore the emerging in-demand skills and evaluate LSBU’s commitment to developing high-calibre graduates who are ready to meet the changing needs of the business world.
1. Data literacy
Businesses have seen unprecedented change and have come to realise the importance of getting to grips with their data, in order to have a better view of their organisation and make informed decisions. This has led to analytical skills becoming a sought-after attribute in new employees. Whether businesses need to identify risks or investigate a problem, professionals who can interpret data, identify trends and integrate new information are increasingly valuable. LSBU supports students in meeting this employer demand, particularly with modules which cover the use for data in decision-making, such as Data for Decision Making or Professional and Digital Skills. The teaching explores the range of ways of handling, analysing and presenting data. The goal is to enable storytelling, drawing key insights from data and using this to drive informed business decisions.
2. Soft skill success
Whilst proficiency in the technical side of finance or business management remains vital to organisations, there is also a rising need for professionals who possess soft skills, such as persuading and influencing stakeholders and colleagues. Finance professionals especially are moving away from simply reporting, and are now shifting focus to providing advice to facilitate growth. LSBU ensures their students are equipped with a toolkit of soft and hard skills to succeed in their careers. Both the finance and business accelerated degrees are shaped to include management modules, which explore the complexities of organisations and key management, organisational behaviour and people management strategies.
3. Aptitude for technology
Today’s fast-moving world requires businesses to effectively utilise technology, and the right kind of technology, in order to keep up with change. The pandemic has fasttracked digital transformation in many organisations and it’s an asset to have the skills to use the latest digital trends and apply the most relevant to their business goals. Exploiting these technologies helps organisations remain agile and resilient to future environmental changes. The rich learning content in LSBU’s accelerated degrees explores digital skills, finance in a digital world and digital transformation in organisations. That ensures graduates enter the job market ready to apply the theory, concepts and practices to support business change. Another skill that is essential to businesses is critical thinking. Since the start of the pandemic, effective critical thinking is more important than ever in making business decisions due to the vast quantity of information circulating in the world, especially as much of it changes on a daily basis. This makes business planning difficult so the ability to think ahead and evaluate the most reliable information, for the long-term, is vital. The learning environment and programme structure at LSBU nurtures critical thinking, innovation, creativity and enterprise. The application of theory to practice, in order to develop and implement appropriate business strategies, consolidates the use of these skills in a real business environment.
5. Autonomous working
An increasingly common hiring trend by HR managers is skills-based hiring, of which the ability to work independently is highly sought after. As remote working practices thrive, employers seek employees who can work proactively and autonomously to ensure their role is a success, irrespective of working location. LSBU aims to enhance the skills needed for independent learning, in order to ensure that students are prepared to take responsibility for their own personal development during the course of their degree programme and in their future careers. Self-managed study supplements and complements classroom-based learning, building up knowledge with a mix of learning activities that are supported by the virtual learning environment. London South Bank University’s strong links to professional bodies, industry specialists and former students, keep it at the forefront of a changing business world. This market intelligence feeds into maintaining first class business courses for its students, especially those studying the Accounting and Finance or Business Management accelerated degree programmes who want to retrain sooner and enter the workforce with highly competitive skills.
Find out more
To learn more about how you can fast-track your career with LSBU’s accelerated degrees, visit www.lsbu.ac.uk/croydon
How to nudge people from gas to heat pumps
In the run up to COP26 the UK Government announced plans to offer households £5,000 grants to assist homes in the transition from gas boilers to heat pumps as part of a raft of measures to move the country to net zero by 2050.
Will it work? Behavioural science might have some answers.
I am part of a research team looking at which behaviour nudges might encourage people to switch from gas central heating to heat pumps. The study has yielded some interesting results. We found that behavioural science can help inform policy and shape consumer behaviour, but only if the financial pain is mitigated.
Let’s begin by looking at the Government’s financial offering. I’d argue that, while the grants are welcome, the funding will only cover 90,000 pumps over three years. Given that up to 25 million homes in the UK have gas boilers and assuming the Government continues this pattern of investment and pump and installation costs do not fall significantly, it would take more than 800 years to get off the gas. That certainly does not meet the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) objective to achieve full decarbonisation of heating by 2050.
And according to our research, behaviour science can help, but it can’t do all the heavy lifting. Money does matter. Heat pumps come in at around £7,000. Gas boilers, by contrast, cost in the region of £2,000 for an average house. Using insights from our research won’t be as effective if transitioning to a heat pump is associated with significantly more financial pain than your average gas boiler. Let me break down what we found in more detail. We asked 599 non-student participants a range of questions designed to test how behavioural prompts may influence people’s choices between a traditional gas boiler and a heat pump. Overall, the research explored four of these: alignment effects, discounting effects, social norms feedback effects and messenger effects.
Alignment effects are when people compare two products according to their features. We found these nudges aren’t helpful with heat pumps because they work in significantly different ways to boilers. If alignment effects are deployed, people are likely to stick with what they know.
Policymakers can use priming, however, to engage people’s higher-order thinking. For example, advocating for heat pumps because they help save the climate.
Discounting effects are the tendency for people to choose short-term savings over long-term ones. So people might prefer a cheaper gas boiler today over the promise of savings over many years with a heat pump. Surprisingly, we found that participants were more patient than we might have expected over the idea of savings in the long run.
Normative feedback effects are about how broader social behaviour and feedback on the consequences of our actions influence choices. We gave groups of people different information, with one being told “a survey reveals that the vast majority of people in your neighbourhood have installed the energy efficient heat pump.” Another group was given information on the impact of heat pumps on the environment, while others were told or the financial benefits of heat pumps compared to a standard gas boiler. We found that normative information about the behaviour of peers or providing details of the financial benefits of investing in a heat pump were most likely to change behaviour.
Finally, we looked at messenger effects – which is where people are heavily influenced by who communicates the information. We compared the impact of messaging from the Government, energy companies, neighbours and industry. We found no distinction between who delivered the message; however, the content of the message – how the pro-environment choice was framed – was significant, so using the normative feedback effects we discovered alongside the financial benefits would help.
The good news is that people are persuadable. The bad news is that our findings won’t be significant unless the scale of investment required for a heat pump is reduced.
So, where does this leave policy? Recent Governmental behaviour suggests a liking for behavioural science. However, behavioural influencing needs to be underpinned by regulation and cost-reduction for it to be effective.
Costs have to be mitigated in some way so that people are not constantly led by price. One way to do this is by a more extensive heat pump and insulation funding programme for households and large buildings.
Another might be to mandate heat pumps at the point of sale when large amounts of money are already changing hands, so people feel the financial commitment to be less. A similar model already being used in the UK is the campaign for septic tank conversions. Engaging lenders to offer green mortgages where a portion of the money lent is for eco-friendly upgrades is also an option.
The Government needs to prompt the industry to lower the costs of heat pumps, particularly installation. Again, the model to emulate is the offshore wind industry, which has reduced costs so significantly that it is moving into a negative subsidy.
And lastly, the policy should focus less on prestige, supply-side projects that make good headlines, like huge wind farms or expensive nuclear energy, and more on local consumption. Converting individual homes, getting communities onto heat networks and better-quality buildings matter just as much as large-scale solar farms.
If we can see movement on policy and costs, then our insights can play a critical role in ensuring the messaging and nudges are the right ones. Done right, we may finally get the UK off the gas.
