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At the end of January, Professor Peter Elias, CBE and Prof Chris Warhurst of IER attended the 3rd Global Labour Markets Conference (GLMC) in Riyadh. There were over 5000 delegates at the conference. Now an annual event, the GLMC is a bit like Davos for labour markets, attended by lots of government ministers, company CEOs and senior trade union officials.

Drawing on his recent experience of co-developing the UK Standard Skills Classification, Peter was asked to talk about how skills could be measured. Chris was asked to talk about policy development to help support the business case for good jobs.

It鈥檚 been a good year for good jobs policy

IER was established 45 years ago with funding from the UK Government and what is now the European Commission. Its task then was to provide labour market forecasts to support policymaking. Although government emphasis on skills has remained constant, government interest in employment policy more broadly has waxed and waned over the years.

How do we define a 'bad job'? Moving beyond arbitrary thresholds, a new study published in The Economic and Labour Relations Review applies a novel wellbeing-based methodology to identify bad jobs in South Korea's labour market. Using Korean Working Conditions Survey data (2014-2023), IER's Dr Sangwoo Lee and Emeritus Professor Francis Green (UCL Institute of Education) demonstrate that workers in the bottom decile of job quality experience distinctly larger wellbeing gains when moving above this threshold – providing empirical justification for defining these as 'bad jobs'.

Professor Philip Taylor attended the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) event in Boston on 12-15 November 2025. He co-chaired sessions on job quality and social care and spoke about early findings from a UK project — Just Systems — where he talked about decarbonising domiciliary adult social care. Added to this, he chaired a meeting of the Aging Workforce Interest Group of GSA, of which he is the convener.

A pioneering study published in provides the first comprehensive examination of multidimensional job quality premiums for university graduates across European labour markets, challenging long-held assumptions about the returns to higher education.

The findings carry important implications for how we evaluate higher education outcomes and may help explain why objective graduate advantages don't always translate into higher subjective wellbeing—the so-called "paradox of the dissatisfied graduate."