The working lives programme supports the creation of insights from research, data and innovation to help us to better understand contemporary transformations in work and working lives, the causal factors involved, and the implications for people, places, sectors, and employers across the UK.
ESRC funds research, data, and innovation that helps us to better understand the nature and impact of contemporary work and working lives on different people, places, sectors, and employers across the UK.
Many of our investments work closely with stakeholders from business, civil society, and government to ensure that their insights transform working lives for the better.
Areas we cover include:
- labour market and employment studies
- labour economics
- linked employer-employee data
- sociology of work and employment
- work psychology and organisational behaviour
- working practices, working conditions, and work organisation
- industrial, employment and workplace relations
- work, health, and wellbeing (including occupational health)
- new forms of work and ways of working
- technological and digital transformations
- work trajectories and career transitions
- human resource management
- equality, diversity, and inclusion
Key investments
ESRC Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Digit)
Digit explores how digital technologies are reshaping work and their impact on employers, workers and their representatives, job seekers and governments.
Current themes include:
- digital ecosystem governance
- digital decisions and adopters
- skills and rewards
- healthy working lives
- location and environment
ESRC Transforming Working Lives programme
This programme brings together a cohort of seven research projects to investigate UK workers’ experiences of contemporary career transitions and shifting workplace power dynamics.
The individual projects are:
- Voice and power in contemporary online retail UK warehouses
- Amplifying employee voice and hearing the unheard
- Minority ethnic doctors’ career transitions in medicine
- Making space for people in truck driving work
- Transition to parenthood in UK small and medium-sized enterprises
- Transitions of young workers in the UK labour market: consequences for careers, earnings, health and wellbeing
- L-earning: rethinking young women’s working lives
Skills and Employment Survey
The Skills and Employment Survey (SES) is a long-running series of surveys of working people stretching back to the mid-1980s. The survey provides unique insights into the working lives of those living in Britain, and how the nature of work and the skills used at work have changed.
Fieldwork for the eighth survey (SES 2024) in the series began in autumn 2023.
Find out more about the Skills and Employment survey series at the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data.
Data infrastructure
Many of ESRC’s strategic data infrastructure investments provide valuable data on work and working lives.
Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK)
ADR UK is a UK-wide partnership transforming the wealth of public sector data into research assets and policy-relevant insights.
Relevant ADR UK projects include:
- Wage and employment dynamics in Britain
- ADR UK Research Fellows: annual survey of hours and earnings linked to Census 2011
- Health and employment retention in Scotland
- Reducing economic inactivity in Northern Ireland
For more details see ADR UK’s World of Work theme
UK Data Service (UKDS)
UKDS provides trusted access and training to use the UK’s largest collection of economic, population and social research data for teaching, learning and public benefit.
Browse the UKDS labour data catalogue
Understanding Society
Understanding Society, the UK Household Longitudinal Study, is the most extensive longitudinal study of its kind and provides crucial information for researchers and policymakers on the changes and stability of people’s lives in the UK.
See Understanding Society’s data on employment
Linked employer employee data
In 2021, ESRC commissioned an options report exploring a potential new national UK-linked employer-employee dataset. This work is being taken forward by the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence, through their project Developing a new Linked Employer Employee Dataset for the UK.