As schoolboys, my generation universally longed to be engine drivers. An engine, for those of you among the subsequent cohorts who missed the fashion for such cravings, was a big steam thing that pulled trains. My partner in life, who works in a Surrey comprehensive school, reports how distant today’s schoolboy is from such ideas. Her male students want to be either policemen or games testers. (I hesitate to report, but must for the sake of completeness, that the females who don’t want to be hairdressers or marry a footballer haven’t a clue what they want to do.)
Odd then, that the ‘game development industry’, as it chooses to style itself, is complaining about a skills gap. Open learning provider Train2Game says half the game-development professionals it surveyed are experiencing a lack of talent.
Or look at ‘green’ energy. “We have witnessed a number of energy companies suffering a skills shortage, particularly engineers and senior managers in the wind sector,” says Jeff Anderson of environmental recruiting agency Taylor Hopkinson. “That’s exacerbated by the workforce nationally ageing and a lack of new talent with relevant skills and education coming into the industry.”
“Skills gap” used to mean “not enough bodies”. In construction, it still does. The Chartered Institute of Building also says 72 per cent of respondents to its survey believe a skills shortage exists—even though construction output sank 11.5 per cent in 2009, the largest single fall since data became available in 1955. The fall would have been bigger were it not for public spending on schools, housing and infrastructure. I suspect the coalition government’s determination to crack down on such frivolity won’t go unnoticed among the brickies and scaffolders.
But increasingly skills shortage means exactly what it says: not enough brains. In its latest skills survey the CBI notes that 72 per cent of firms, especially those in advanced manufacturing and low carbon industries, need employees with science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) skills. But 45 per cent of employers are having difficulty recruiting STEM-skilled staff, says the CBI. “Urgent action is needed,” it says, “to increase the number of young people studying STEM subjects.” Two thirds of employers in manufacturing (65 per cent), science/hi-tech/IT (66 per cent), and energy and water (67 per cent) for example are calling on the government to act.
The reasons for lack of skills vary. Just as the CBI discovered, Computer Weekly reported last spring that immigrants were snapping up UK jobs because the natives simply didn’t have the skills to fit the bill. The UK’s biotechnology and medical sectors, meanwhile, are trying to deal with the fact that there aren’t enough animal researchers because training them is so expensive. But the Nursing Times reports that gaps in nurses’ knowledge often contribute to the deaths of patients with learning disabilities. There, says Royal College of Nursing forum chair Michael Brown, it’s not just that the nurses are poorly educated but that they are so busy they don’t have the time to bone up on the skills that stops them killing their patients. Though he didn’t quite put it like that.
Overall, it is extraordinary that, in mid-recession, with unemployment allegedly so high, you can’t move without finding skills shortages. Ridiculously, UK Music, an umbrella organisation set up by Feargal Sharkey to represent musicians, is carrying out a skills audit “to understand, evaluate and anticipate potential skills gaps across the commercial music sector.” When the music industry says it is short of skills I begin to smell a bagful of rats. You cannot walk the pavements of any moderately sized UK city without having at some stage to elbow your way past a muso and his bucket. The bodies are there; not sure about the skills.
But is there another explanation. I’ve touched on the ‘alleged’ rise in unemployment. Cast an eye over the figures, and you see an unemployment benefit claimant count of 1.5 or so million. By the definition used by the International Labour Organisation, our unemployment rate is running at 2.5m, nearly twice the claimant count. Even so, though today’s economy is supposed to be going through its worst crisis in 60 years, the unemployment totals are nowhere near the 3.5m totals of the mid-1980s.
Then, by the way, the ILO and claimant counts tallied. But that was before the UK tinkered with the way it counted the workless. I suspect, as the construction industry is about to find out, that when all the public spending cuts begin to bite, skills shortages will be the least of our worries.
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