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About the Skills Escalator

The NHS Plan sets out a vision of a modernised NHS with many more staff, working differently. It describes how services will be redesigned around the patient's journey and how this will radically improve the patient's experience. Our strategy to deliver the challenging objective of growing and changing the workforce is called the Skills Escalator.

The essence of this approach is that staff are encouraged through a strategy of lifelong learning to constantly renew and extend their skills and knowledge, enabling them to move up the escalator. Meanwhile, efficiencies and skillmix benefits are generated by delegating roles, work and responsibilities down the escalator where appropriate.

Some staff may wish to develop their skills at a particular level of responsibility. Others may choose to develop the skills necessary for the next level of responsibility. This does not guarantee promotion or advancement but it puts them in a position to take advantage of openings that become available.

In this way, people are enabled to have careers that are satisfying, whilst simultaneously filling skills gaps that develop because of staff turnover and new or increased demand for a service. This will help reduce the stagnation that can occur at all levels of the career ladder - we are looking to re-stimulate people with new challenges.

The Skills Escalator operates at all levels of the workforce, thus offering the powerful recruitment message of endless opportunity. Its extreme expression is that in theory, staff can progress from cleaner or porter to consultant or chief executive. This can be illustrated by showing the various stages of development as basic categories, which are listed below.

The Skills Escalator is also about attracting a wider range of people to work within the NHS by offering a variety of step-on and step-off points. Traditional entry points such as registered professional staff will continue but they will be complemented by other entry routes such as cadet schemes and role conversion, attracting people in other careers who are seeking new challenges and drawing people back into the labour market.

This offers the dual benefit of growing the NHS workforce whilst also tackling problems of longer-term unemployment and social exclusion, which have such a high correlation with poor health. It will enable people to start or further develop careers in the NHS, as young people starting out or in mid- or later-life as a second career. Age, background and existing academic attainment will no longer be barriers to those with the potential and will to progress their careers. It will also enable the NHS to have a workforce that is more representative of local communities and touch with their needs.

Employers will benefit because a structured programme of skills development and acquisition will help them to recruit and retain staff, developing them to fill posts which are traditionally hard to recruit to.

Individuals will benefit in a range of ways. Those who are finding it difficult to get into permanent employment, who have limited formal education and older people looking for second chances can be introduced or reintroduced to the working environment and developed so that they can subsequently be employed within the NHS.

Those already within the NHS will benefit from the opportunity to develop and enhance their skills and take on new and more challenging roles. Communities will benefit from an active approach to employing and developing staff by major local employers.

The Skills Escalator links with a range of other policy initiatives including the Lifelong Learning strategy, NHSU and Agenda for Change.

• Working together, learning together: a framework for lifelong learning for the NHS
• NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, and Skills for Health
• Agenda for Change