Skills for Care Size and Structure Report

Thanks for the feedback last week about the Training Matrix; lots of thought and feedback went into its development and I just wanted to thank those customers who shared their ideas.   

We have just released a survey to help inform and prioritise our Autumn development schedule.  So if you want a new topic to be covered by Click, please do let us know.

Alongside building, designing and releasing the Training Matrix, the world has carried on though it feels even stranger than it did a few months back, when Coronavirus had just been discovered.  

So, this week, I wanted to spend a little time looking at the Size & Structure of the Workforce Report that Skills for Care released last week as there are some really interesting insights in there…

Not least of which is the fact that turnover is still at 30.8% or 440,000 people leavers per annum!  You all know how hard it is to find staff but when that many people change jobs each year, the costs are almost immeasurable.  However, the real insight here is that 66% of people stay in the sector, which is great, but by definition 34% leave the sector, a huge drain on skills and talent.  On a personal note, I am sad to see that Andy Tilden is leaving Skills for Care and I hope we can count on his knowledge and skills staying in the sector.

A real eye opener for me was the clarification that 26% of employers have a turnover of less than 10%, which means that it is possible to keep churn low!  I know one of our customers was able to reduce their turnover figure down to 8% by incorporating digital delivery methods into their Care Certificate Induction programme.  Now, if the best part of 150,000 people are leaving the sector each year (34% of 440,000) and the vacancy rate is still around 120,000, we really need to find out what those successful providers are doing and model them.

As we move from a period of great uncertainty and all of the things we have had to do differently as a result of that, there is more in the Size and Structure Report that really struck me.

For example, the sector struggles to retain younger people… turnover rates for the under-20’s was a whopping 43.7% and the turnover rate for those who have been in the sector less than a year similar at 41.7%.

So, if we have all of this data, what can we do with it?  Well, firstly, we know that turnover in single digits is possible and the impact is huge, not least of which on costs and administration, but also in consistency of care.  So just how did our customer do it?  They simply blended their face-to-face delivery with digital methods.  Given that the Skills for Care guidance recommends doing something very similar due to Coronavirus, why not do some digging or thinking?  Is there another way?  Anything they can do…

I wonder if younger people with their phones and tech-connected lifestyles get bored with traditional training methods and that is why we struggle to retain them?  I know when I needed to learn why my tomatoes were not producing tomatoes, the first place I went was YouTube (in my day it would have been the library).  We now have limitless information at our fingertips; perhaps we could try and use this information accessibility to our advantage with younger care workers?

There is a lot more information in the report which I will endeavour to get to over the coming weeks.  However, it did strike me that if the vacancy rate is 122,000, 150,000 people leave social care each year and we need another 520,000 workers in the sector over the coming years and 250,000 current workers are non-British, we have the opportunity to really do things differently.  We have to, for social care’s sake.