Regional Skills Assessments

Regional Skills Assessments (RSAs) provide a coherent evidence base to inform future investment in skills, built up from existing datasets and forecasts. 

Skills Development Scotland has worked with key partners and stakeholders in the production of RSAs to ensure an inclusive approach to their development, dissemination and utilisation. 

RSAs are published annually, covering all Regional Outcome Agreement areas, City and Growth Deal Regions and Rural Scotland. The RSAs offer detailed information on regional labour markets across the country. Oxford Economics forecast data has been updated in this release of the RSAs. The data contained in this release is the most up to date available at the time of writing. A separate technical note is available to provide more information on the main datasets utilised within the RSAs. 

The latest iteration of the RSAs includes 23 reports, and summary infographics for each local authority are available through the Data Matrix. 

We value user feedback on the Regional Skills Assessments. If you would like to provide feedback on the RSAs please do so here.

The Evidence and Impact team can be contacted at rsa@sds.co.uk to support any queries.

Webinars

Between November 2023 and January 2024, the Evidence and Impact team held a series of sectoral and regional webinars to complement the publication of the Regional and Sectoral Skills Assessments. The recordings of the webinars can be found on the SDS YouTube Channel here.

A series of sectoral webinars have also been delivered. Find out more.

Data Matrix

The Data Matrix is an interactive tool, which is regularly updated and offers data from a variety of sources in a visually engaging format.  

The Data Matrix landing page offers access to the two-page infographics from RSA reports and the full data matrix covering three themes: 

• Skills Supply: the supply of people within the labour market

• Skills Demand: the demand for skills within the labour market

• Skills Mismatches: where there is a gap between the demand for skills and the supply of skills within the labour market.

The Data Matrix covers the following geographies: 

• Local Authorities

• Regional Outcome Agreement (ROA) areas

• City Deals

• Growth Deals

• Rural Scotland (available through ‘Rural Local Authorities’ button)

The Data Matrix also contains two-page RSA summary infographics.   

Guidance on how to use the Data Matrix: 

• Guidance Document

• Video tutorial 

• Glossary

If you have any queries, or comments, please contact rsa@sds.co.uk.