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The skills gap
Understand the current job market, then make it work to your advantage. With skills you’re always welcome. Find out how to fine-tune yours
The biggest headache facing British Industry today is an acute shortage of skilled workers. The UK currently has a million people unemployed, with a further 7.6 million people of working age inactive in the labour market, and yet, there remain over a million jobs unfilled. Many are asking, how did we get here?
Skills shortages are being experienced across the board, not just within the traditional problem areas of nursing and teaching. Accountancy, social work, medicine and, ironically, recruitment are all being severely affected. According to a recent survey by recruitment specialist, Reed, two-thirds of British firms are experiencing the crisis. The most desperate shortages of staff relate to specialist skills with 20 % of employers complaining that they had problems filling posts requiring technical and engineering skills, 19% with IT and 16% with accounting skills.
Employment minister Tessa Jowell said, ‘A particular challenge for the future will be in IT skills shortages. We already know that over 18 million UK workers now require basic IT competence to do their job. There are 1.2 million currently employed at technician level, expected to grow by 20-25% in the next three years.’ So bad is the lack of IT skills in Britain that a door knocking campaign has begun to recruit set targets onto the government’s Independent Learning Accounts, where online desktop computing skills are being offered at a bargain price of £25. ‘Some commentators have estimated that, if we do not do anything to address this skills gap, 12 per cent of vacancies for professional IT jobs could go unfilled in 2002,’ said Jowell.
Lloyds TSB periodic survey, Business in Britain, recently highlighted the skills shortage within companies using their banking services. Managing Director Michael Riding says, ‘The yawning skills gap is turning into a hazardous abyss across all sectors. In terms of recruiting unskilled staff, similar trends are also emerging.’ Production line workers, shelf packers and internal postal workers – jobs that almost anyone can do – continue to remain vacant.
But how has this acute problem arisen, and how did we fail to nip it in the bud?
Next page: the causes
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