SKILL SHORTAGES IN THE UK!

I have been reading the Edge foundation Bulletin on Skill Shortages in the UK and it exposes, once again, the severity of skills shortages across the wider UK economy with over two-thirds (68%) of UK employers saying they have struggled to find workers with the skills they need in the previous year. It stresses that:

• 92 per cent of companies say soft skills matter as much or more than hard skills 
• A third of the working age population have few or no qualifications 
• The Office for National Statistics estimated that 1.5 million jobs are at high risk of automation 
• 70.2 per cent of the jobs most at risk are currently held by women.

The report’s author, Edge’s Director of Policy and Research, Olly Newton, puts it so well:

‘By bringing together analysis from across organisations and sectors, we can see this is a perfect storm. The fact that employers struggle to recruit because candidates don’t have the skills they need, shows the depth of the schism between education policy and industrial strategy.

‘The so-called ‘soft skills’ that people need to secure employment, should be called ‘critical skills’ because these are the skills, behaviours and aptitudes we need in the workplace now and to adapt to the jobs of the future. It is women, younger people and those with lower levels of skills-who are most vulnerable to being replaced by computer programs, algorithms or robots. We should be mapping our curriculum and life-long learning offer to the skills we need for 21st century jobs, not to the 19th century notion that exam grades are the only measure of talent and ability.’