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On 14 September, Dr Sangwoo Lee presented at an expert roundtable hosted by the British Academy.  Sharing findings from his recent research on multidimensional graduate job quality premiums across the UK and Europe, he argued that conventional evaluative metrics, which rely heavily on gross earnings and standard employment status, fail to capture the realities of modern graduate employment.

IER was also represented at the roundtable by Professor Peter Elias and Gabriel Atfield, contributing to discussions on skills, regional inequality, and the future data infrastructure needed to assess fair and sustainable work across the UK.

Around 1.8 million UK workers have poor mental or physical health due to their jobs. The cost to the economy is £18.8 billion every year. What if we stopped trying to fix workers, and started creating healthy jobs instead?

Our panels of experts will introduce the latest findings from the Project including:

• The Healthy Jobs Framework tool
• New evidence on practices that make jobs healthy
• Interactive Q&A

The webinar will take place on Tuesday 15 September, 13:00-13:45 hours

Register

As part of the Horizon Europe-funded Skills PULSE project, a newly published introduces a novel empirical framework to identify and measure potential skill shortages across European labour markets.

Co-authored by IER’s Dr Sangwoo Lee alongside Seamus McGuinness, Elisa Staffa, Lorcan Kelly, and Paul Redmond, the paper addresses a longstanding gap in the skills mismatch literature, where definitions of skill shortages vary widely and rely heavily on subjective employer surveys.

Orthopaedic Research UK (ORUK) are hosting a conference to showcase breakthrough technologies, practical deployment strategies and collaborative opportunities to help employers prevent work-related musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions.

The event will include speakers from organisations including British Airways, BUPA, Transport for London, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and the Institute for Employment Research. It will also feature experts on the use of ergonomics and robotics, plus start-ups developing innovative workplace solutions for MSK health.

The conference takes place on 13 October 2026 at the Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole Street, London W1. Further information and booking can be found

Careers advice is a critical component of UK education and work transitions, particularly for disadvantaged groups. Around 33% of students currently use Large language model (LLM) tools for guidance, but policy makers, service managers, and practitioners lack evidence on how well they perform.

A new project, led by IER’s Associate Professor Peter Dickinson and funded by the Nuffield Foundation, will address this evidence gap. The project will develop and pilot a framework to evaluate LLM-powered careers advice tools against a human adviser baseline. Further education students and advisors from college around the UK will take part. The advisory group, chaired by Huw Morris, University College London, met in-person at IER this month, bringing a wealth of experience from the Higher Education and Skills sector.