Skills, Work and Technology

Overview

This research cluster examines graduate labour markets, skills utilisation, and technological disruption. The unifying concern is heterogeneity: higher education expansion and technological change do not affect all graduates, jobs, or skills equally. Understanding who benefits—and who doesn’t—requires moving beyond average effects to examine how returns vary across fields, occupations, firms, and career paths.

Research Questions

• How has employer demand for graduate-level skills evolved, and how well are graduates’ skills actually utilised?
• What are the economic returns to STEM education, and why do they vary so much across graduates?
• Which workers and jobs are most exposed to generative AI, and what does this mean for the future of skilled work?
• When graduates earn more, is it because of what they know, what they do, or where they work?

Approach

This work combines task-based measurement of job skill requirements with large-scale labour market data. Rather than relying on occupational titles or qualification levels, I use detailed information on what workers actually do in their jobs—drawing particularly on the Skills and Employment Survey series. For questions about STEM returns and career progression, I work with linked administrative data on education and earnings. Recent work on AI exposure applies natural language processing to measure how job tasks overlap with large language model capabilities.

Funded Projects

• Graduate Labour Market and Equity — Centre for Global Higher Education, 2020–2024. Project page
• ADR UK Research Fellowship — Administrative Data Research UK, 2024–2026. Programme page

Key Publications

1. Degrees of demand: a task-based analysis of the British graduate labour market

   Golo Henseke, Alan Felstead, Duncan Gallie, and 1 more author

   Oxford Economic Papers, 2025

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   This study investigates the evolving demand for graduate skills in the British workforce, leveraging a task-based approach with data from the Skills and Employment Survey Series.

2. How exposed are UK jobs to generative AI? Developing and applying a novel task-based index

   Golo Henseke, Rhys Davies, Alan Felstead, and 3 more authors

   arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.22748, 2025

   Abs DOI arXiv

   

   We develop the Generative AI Susceptibility Index (GAISI), a task-based measure of UK job exposure to large language models. By 2023-24, nearly all UK jobs exhibited some exposure, yet only a minority were heavily affected.

3. Europe’s evolving graduate labour markets: supply, demand, underemployment and pay

   Francis Green and Golo Henseke

   Journal for Labour Market Research, 2021

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   Analysing European graduate labour markets up to 2015, we find that graduate supply increased and converged across countries, while graduate job growth was slower and non-convergent. Underemployment spread modestly, real wages trended downward, and graduate wage premiums declined in several countries.

4. Should governments of OECD countries worry about graduate underemployment?

   Francis Green and Golo Henseke

   Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 2016

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   Using a new index of graduate jobs across 21 OECD countries, we find that graduate underemployment is correlated with supply-demand imbalance and associated with lower pay and job satisfaction, though higher education retains external benefits even for the underemployed.

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