7CO01 Assignment Example
The CIPD-set assessment for 7CO01 Work and Working Lives in a Changing Business Environment is one of the most demanding pieces of work on the Advanced Diploma. Centres receive sixteen questions in advance and CIPD selects four for submission, drawn from different learning outcomes. Each answer must be approximately 1,000 words, persuasively argued, and supported by wider reading. This 7CO01 assignment example walks through four sample answers — covering globalisation, technology, demographic change and sustainability — written to Distinction standard so you can see how the marking criteria of focus, depth and breadth, strategic application, research, persuasiveness and presentation translate into actual prose.
Question 1 (AC 1.1) — The future of globalisation
“To what extent do you agree with the view that the trend towards greater globalisation has peaked and that its extent will decline in the next few years? Assess in what major ways a retreat from globalisation would affect employment markets in your country.”
The proposition that globalisation has peaked is partially defensible but ultimately too simplistic. The data instead point to a structural reconfiguration of cross-border economic activity rather than its decline. World merchandise trade as a share of global GDP has plateaued at roughly 56–58 per cent since 2008, having grown almost continuously between 1985 and the financial crisis (WTO, 2024). Foreign direct investment flows have weakened markedly, falling 12 per cent globally in 2024 (UNCTAD, 2024). On the surface, this supports what Wolf (2023) calls “slowbalisation” — the thesis that the post-Cold War wave of integration has run its course.
However, the evidence of disengagement is selective. While trade in physical goods has stagnated, services trade has continued to grow at over 6 per cent annually, and digitally delivered services rose 9 per cent in 2024 (WTO, 2024). What is changing is the geography and architecture of integration, not its overall depth. The IMF (2024) describes the present moment as “geo-economic fragmentation”: firms are not retreating to national markets but reorganising into regional and politically aligned blocs through “friend-shoring” and “near-shoring”. Stiglitz (2024) argues persuasively that this represents a re-pricing of globalisation to internalise resilience and political risk — costs that the hyperglobal model of the 1990s and 2000s suppressed. From this perspective, globalisation is not peaking but maturing.
For the United Kingdom — a small, services-orientated, open economy — the implications of any sustained retreat would be substantial. The UK depends on trade for roughly 64 per cent of GDP, and around six million jobs are connected to exports (ONS, 2024). A meaningful unwinding of integration would affect employment markets through three principal channels.
The first is sectoral redistribution. Goods-trading sectors already exposed to friend-shoring — automotive, advanced manufacturing, pharmaceuticals — would face pressure to localise supply chains, a process underway since the post-Brexit Trade and Cooperation Agreement and accelerated by US Inflation Reduction Act subsidies pulling investment toward North America (CIPD, 2024a). Marchington and Kynighou (2024) note that workforce planning in such firms has shifted from cost arbitrage to capability redundancy: holding skills domestically that were previously outsourced. The implication for people practice is a renewed emphasis on apprenticeships, upskilling and retention rather than international labour pipelines.
The second channel is skills competition. The UK’s comparative advantage in tradeable services — finance, legal, creative industries, higher education — depends on continued openness. WEF (2025) estimates that 44 per cent of workers’ core skills will be disrupted between 2025 and 2030, with the steepest disruption in service economies. A retreat from globalisation, particularly any reduction in skilled migration, would tighten labour markets in roles already showing chronic vacancy levels above 1.1 per cent (ONS, 2025). Susskind (2023) argues that the dominant constraint on advanced economies is no longer capital but cognitive capacity; restricting cross-border talent flows would amplify wage inflation in knowledge work and slow productivity growth.
The third channel is institutional. The UK’s labour market is unusually flexible by European standards, but reglobalisation pressures push toward greater state coordination. The introduction of the Employment Rights Bill 2024–25, the expansion of statutory sick pay, and the strengthening of trade union access rights all suggest a return to more managed labour relations (Lewis and Sargeant, 2023; UK Government, 2025). For HR professionals, this raises the strategic stakes of compliance, employee voice and procedural fairness.
On balance, I disagree with the strong form of the “peak globalisation” thesis. Globalisation is being remade, not reversed. Yet the implications for UK people management are real: workforce strategies built on the assumption of frictionless international labour and supply markets are no longer prudent. The most effective response is not isolation but selective resilience — investing in domestic skills pipelines, redesigning roles around adaptive capability, and treating geopolitical risk as a permanent feature of strategic workforce planning (CIPD, 2024a; Marchington and Kynighou, 2024).
(Word count: 945)
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