Scottish Employer Perspectives Survey 2021

Footnotes

1. Scottish Employer Perspectives Survey: 2019 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

2. The March 2021 IDBR population data was the latest available at the time of reporting.

3. Definitions for these sectors can be found in Table 10 in Appendix A. A six-sector breakdown was used for the 2021 survey due to the reduction in the overall sample size to 1,000 interviews. Collapsing the sectors was required to ensure the margin of error could be minimised, allowing for robust subgroup analysis.

4. By "past 12 months", this would be since November or December 2020 as the fieldwork for this survey ran between November-December 2021.

5. This question was only asked to those who had already been in business for 12 months or longer to prevent start-ups, who would be more likely to have grown during this period, from skewing the results.

6. It should be noted that the prompted recruitment services have changed since 2019 to reflect the latest services on offer. In 2021, the Jobcentre Plus Kickstart Scheme, Fair Start Scotland, No One Left Behind, and the Young Person's Guarantee were added as prompted options. Youth Contract, Work Able Scotland and the Employer Recruitment Incentive were removed.

7. Internal resources is a grouped category that combines several individual response codes. There are various examples of grouped categories in the report. More information about how codes map to grouped categories can be found in the published Technical Report.

8. Meta-skills was added as a new prompted factor in the 2021 survey and includes attributes such as problem solving, critical thinking, communication, creativity, and leadership.

9. Examples of Non-market Services include those operating in public administration, education, and health and social care. More information on the subsectors included within each broad sector category can be found in Table 10 in Appendix A.

10. Positive Action refers to a range of measures that allow employers to encourage and train people from under-represented groups and help them overcome disadvantages in competing with other applicants.

11. Blind or no name recruitment is a recruitment process that removes the names from candidates' applications so that they remain anonymous.

12. A description about what work inspiration activities are, and the extent to which employers engage in them is covered in the 'work inspiration activities' section.

13. Developing the young workforce: Scotland's youth employment strategy – gov.scot (wwww.gov.scot)

14. For this question, results for the Manufacturing sector are based on a low sample size of 46 respondents. As such, some caution should be applied in interpreting these results.

15. For 2021, 'Training courses not running due to COVID-19' was a new supply barrier and 'You were unable to fund training due to COVID-19' was a new resource barrier.

16. Results based on the 'started offering apprenticeships in the last three years' group should be interpreted with caution due to a low sample size of 42 respondents. This includes their reasons for starting to offer apprenticeships and information about who initiated contact when the employer first started to offer apprenticeships.

17. Scottish EPS 2019: Official Statistics publication

18. UK EPS 2014: Research Report

19. UK EPS 2016: Research Report

20. As part of the UK EPS.