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News
Siân Harrington, 19 May 2011
The UK’s talent crisis has deepened, with employers having more difficulty filling vacant positions than at any time since 2007. According to a Manpower survey published today, more than half of businesses globally say unfilled positions are having an impact on customers and investors.
One in six UK employers is finding it difficult to fill critical positions, compared to one in 11 last year, despite ONS figures released yesterday showing 2.46 million people unemployed. Engineering jobs are the most difficult to fill.
However, employers are not addressing the root of the talent mismatch, the survey finds. Only 12% of UK employers are providing additional learning and development to internal talent, to enable them to move into hard-to-fill positions. This compares to 21% internationally.
The Manpower Group sixth annual Talent Shortage Survey researched nearly 40,000 employers across 39 countries in the first quarter of 2011. Across the world, three-quarters of employers cite a lack of experience, skills or knowledge as the primary reason for difficulty filling positions. Technicians, sales representatives and skilled-trades workers are the hardest-to-fill roles globally.
Counter-intuitively, employers in India, the US, China and Germany report the most dramatic talent shortage surges, compared to last year. In India, the percentage of employers indicating difficulty filling positions jumped 51 percentage points.
Manpower UK managing director Mark Cahill said companies would be in for a rude awakening when the labour market tightens.
“The recession, and now this slow recovery, have made the talent mismatch in the UK even more stark. Many organisations that have previously cut their headcounts are finding that they need to increase their workforce in an increasingly talent-hungry market,” he said.
“Though the UK suffers less than other countries, there is no doubt that globally we are heading towards an employability crisis,” Cahill added.
A fifth of employers believe that, when positions are not filled in a timely way, this has a high impact on key stakeholders, while 37% believe it has a medium impact. However, 11% say there is no impact and 7% say they do not know what the impact is.
Just 6% of employers are working closely with educational institutions to create curriculums to close knowledge gaps and only 20% are concentrating on learning and development to fill the shortage.
“We need to see more companies ‘manufacturing’ the talent they need in order to support their long-term business strategy. This requires a fundamental shift in the way companies structure and organise their workforce, develop their people and incentivise talent,” said Cahill.
UK’s top 10 most difficult job to fill in 2011
1 Engineers
2 Chefs/cooks
3 Management/executive
4 Sales representatives
5 Drivers
6 Technicians
7 Skilled trades
8 Teachers
9 Accounting and finance staff
10 IT staff
Source: Manpower Group, Sixth Annual Talent Shortage Survey
3 comments on this article |
Tony Keville 19 May 2011
The origin of the current skills shortage lies much further back than most people would care to remember. The government of the day eliminated the apprenticeship schemes and this has lead, not as intended to an improvement in skills but to a profound deterioration in the skill levels now found in younger fitters etc. We have to re-educate them to an acceptable level. As the various recessions have come and gone training budgets have been cut to the bone whilst in contrast we have seen vast increases in corporate accountancy, legal and personnel staff. In my own field 400 staff will be leaving each year and only 30 are being trained to fill those places. BUT the biggest issue is in schools. I have been a governor for 25 years and during that time have had countless arguments with teachers and Ofsted inspectors about curriculum balance. To put it bluntly a school is a factory producing a product that the rest of life requires and until they can see the truth in that statement unpleasant might it be, we in industry are stuck with having to accept a poor quality product and re-educate those pupils to a basic level of literacy and numeracy. Skills they should have acquired at school. The education industry is unfortunately run by educationalists few of whom have any industrial experience and who are simply perpetuating irrelevant teaching topics and methods. There is no program to instil a strong work effort in the pupils. To compound this, teachers have been literally castrated by removing their abilities to impose discipline at a meaningful level. The solution is to get rid of much of the paperwork now required and start to introduce more emphasis on teaching literacy and numeracy, to impose a higher level of discipline, to instil a work ethos and get rid of namby pamby airy fairy non-subjects.
Diana Hogbin-Mills 19 May 2011
Interesting research. The figure of "only 12% of UK employers are providing additional learning and development to internal talent" was particularly striking. From my experience of delivering career development workshops and working with high performers, it is not just the skills that internal hires need to develop. They need to better manage their reputation and get over the feeling that they are being big-headed if they talk about their strengths and aspiration to do a job. It can and is done elegantly. This is often a bigger, unspoken barrier because they may not be seen as a safe pair of hands; all the more important in times of uncertainty, when succeeding needs to be made certain.
Alien 19 May 2011
But how many of these employers who are unable to recruit, the majority of whom (per this article) are not providing training, are looking for young (i.e. cheap) staff [Wages offered can help profile the applicant lists and so avoid discrimination.] when they could find many more skilled and more conscientious employees among the older age groups? As in all things - you tend to get what you pay for!
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