The British Opportunity Index: A Corporate Scorecard of Worker Advancement is an effort to give companies and other stakeholders a set of robust tools that measure how well major employers are doing in fostering economic mobility for workers and how they could do better.
The British Opportunity Index draws upon the groundbreaking research leveraged to construct the American Opportunity Index, which launched its third iteration in October 2024. The American Opportunity Index, developed in partnership with the Burning Glass Institute, the Schultz Family Foundation, and the Harvard Business School Project on Managing the Future of Work Initiative, debuted as the first-of-its-kind corporate scorecard of worker mobility that leveraged purely outside-in data to assess America’s Fortune 500 companies. The British Opportunity Index builds on this work and applies a similarly novel lens to assess companies in the United Kingdom.
Firms are assessed across four broad categories:
› Promotion – How workers are promoted internally (how often are workers moving up and are they receiving material pay bumps when they do?) and on how they find strong opportunities when they leave the firm. In other words, when workers move to a new employer, has the experience they have gained prepared them for better opportunity in their next role?
› Pay – This category measures both how well workers are paid relative to those in the same role elsewhere and how much their pay has grown over time.
› Access – How open firms are to hiring workers without experience, and whether they hire workers without bachelor’s degrees.
› Culture – Retention rates at a firm test whether the firm has built a culture in which people want to build a career, as well as the share of Leaders Drawn from Within, as a proxy for whether the firm’s culture is oriented toward advancement.
Learn more: https://www.britishopportunityindex.org/