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COMMENT

Increasing the skills of workers (young and old) must be a top priority

The Times

A report by the Office for National Statistics published last week shone a spotlight on some of the key workforce trends of the past decade. They included a fall by two thirds in the number of typists and telephonists, with a corresponding rise of more than 200 per cent in the number of “finance officers”, and almost 300 per cent in “project management professionals”. Separately, an analysis by the Royal Society of the Arts showed a loss during the last decade of 289,000 jobs on the high street.

We know that the nature of work will keep changing — consider the fall in agricultural employment from 20 per cent in 1848 to under 1 per cent today — but Britain is poor at investing