Employer Perspectives on Part-time Students in UK Higher Education
A new report has been written by Geoff Mason and Rebecca Hopkin for the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) on Employer Perspectives on Part-time Students in UK Higher Education.
Part-time participation in higher education (HE) by people already in employment potentially represents an important means of skills updating and improvement for the UK economy. In particular, combining prior work experience and part-time HE study could help to increase the supply of highly-educated people with the types of ‘employability skills’ that are widely sought by employers. A further attraction of this mode of skills development is that it minimises absence from work, with individuals investing their own time in study. This report draws on recent surveys of part-time students and their employers in the UK in order to investigate the extent of employer support for part-time HE study by paying course fees and other study costs. It finds that there are a number of advantages for both employers and students in such arrangements. It then goes on to discuss why employer support of this kind is not more common than it is.
The full report is available here:
