When it comes to the skills most badly needed by British businesses right now, new research has revealed it’s all about technology and engineering.
At least that’s what the Recruitment and Employment Confederation says, according to its most recent outlook on jobs. The REC reported that the skills shortage is absolutely ravaging the engineering and technical sector, and not just for permanent vacancies – there’s a lack of available freelancers or umbrella company contractors for all these job billings.
On the one hand, this is rather bad by almost all accounts. If even the nation’s sizable contract worker population is stretched so thin that it can’t keep the demand for new jobs in a particular sector, it’s going to be harder and harder for these firms to continue to grow and expand without the requisite number of staff. Then again, on the other hand the remaining freelancers who are working in the sector will be able to choose from a plethora of positions, all of which will be offering very attractive compensation packages in order to remain competitive. Good news for anyone who manages to land such a position indeed, but cold comfort for the rest of those firms who are left high and dry – and unable to exceed their current capacity!
Honestly I don’t see how this could be resolved without a massive shakeup of the way the entirety of the UK handles recruitment and career education. There’s still plenty of unemployed Brits who aren’t skilled enough for the vacancies out there, and there are fears that firms will begin to outsource work overseas in order to remain in business. Of course the alternative would be to relax immigration laws here at home in order to attract overseas talent to British soil – but that opens up a whole other can of worms with blokes the like of the UKIP. Can you imagine the row something like that would cause? It would be enough to make me giggle if it wasn’t so bloody depressing.
So what’s the best course of action besides completely refurbishing our entire educational system? Damned if I know. Something like that could take years – what do we do right here and right now to stem the rising tide?
