Scottish Employer Skills Survey 2020: Technical Report

Questionnaire design

Questionnaire development and changes from the 2017 survey

Where possible the questionnaire for 2020 was aligned with the questionnaire used for the 2017 survey to allow for time-series comparisons on key measures. However, some of the 2017 ESS questions were removed to help reduce length to account for: (i) removal of modularisation of questions (as done for the UK survey in 2017); and (ii) to make space for additional COVID-19-related questions. To minimise the number of questions that had to be removed, it was agreed to increase the interview length from 21 minutes in ESS17 to a target interview length of 25 minutes.

The ESS 2017 questions that were not included in the 2020 survey are shown in Appendix D.

The approach taken to incorporate questions on COVID-19 was three-fold: (i) Some longstanding ESS questions had additional codes added to the read-out and non-read out codes (this also included some Brexit-related codes); (ii) The training section of the questionnaire had a series of new Covid-related questions added; and (iii) A new Covid-related section of the questionnaire was added.

New codes added to the existing questionnaire (including those related to Brexit and COVID-19) are summarised in Table 3 below.

The new COVID-related training questions explored:

• Whether those who had received online training or e-learning had done this as a replacement for training they would have done face-to-face had the pandemic not occurred (F7C);
• Whether training levels were expected to increase, decrease or stay the same over the next 12 months (F17-F18) and the extent to which COVID-19 was a factor in these plans (F19-F20);
• Training undertaken in the previous six months in response to COVID-19 (F21); and,
• Whether establishments planned to arrange or fund any training related to COVID-19 in the next 6 months (F22nw).

As noted above, a new section of the questionnaire was also added to the 2020 questionnaire to explore the impacts of COVID-19, including:

• The number of staff furloughed by employers via the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (J1 and J1RAN);
• How the furlough scheme was used in terms of use of flexible furlough options and rotating staff between periods of work and furlough (J2 and J7);
• Whether staff had been made redundant due to the pandemic (J3) and whether this included staff previously on the furlough scheme (J4);
• Whether establishments accessed government-backed financial support and whether this influenced furlough decisions (J5 and J6);
• Activities undertaken by furloughed staff (J8);
• The impact of COVID-19 on homeworking and productivity (J9 and J10); and,
• The impact of COVID-19 on working practices (J11).

Piloting the 2020 survey

A pilot of the questionnaire was conducted between the 6th October and 8th October 2020 to test the suitability of changes made to the questionnaire, and to ensure the questionnaire flowed well and was of an appropriate length and nature for CATI-based interviewing. A total of 25 pilot interviews were completed among employers across a range of size bands and sectors. Sample for the pilot phase was drawn from the 2019 Scottish Employer Perspectives Survey (EPS), where respondents had given permission to be re-contacted for future research.

The pilot found that the survey questionnaire was running around 2 minutes over the target average length. Three further questions were deleted from the questionnaire, as shown in Appendix D. The pilot also helped to identify some further changes that were needed to help refine the new COVID-19 questions.

Questionnaire timings

The average overall interview length was around 26 minutes. This varied between different employers depending on their recruitment activities, experience of skill-shortage vacancies, internal skills gaps and training activities. (The length of the shortest interview was 7 minutes and the longest was 56 minutes).^[5]

As shown in Table 4, interviews with larger establishments took longer on average given that they were more likely to have trained their staff and to have experienced skill-shortage vacancies and/or skills gaps given their greater number of employees.