What’s the real issue behind labour shortages in the UK? An opinion of Mario Bardwell, Director of Position 1 Recruitment.
It’s 2024 and despite all UK Government and other agency initiatives, there is still a gap between the number of vacancies in the UK economy and eligible workers to “fill” them. Actually, in February, the number of job vacancies reduced to below 1 million (936,000 according to the Office of National Statistics) from 1.2 million recorded in November 2023.
Does this mean that we now in an upward curve in filling those positions which previously were causing UK business and industry such concern since the situation created by the COVID pandemic in 2020?
……..Well, I’m not too sure!
I think that this may indicate that has been a consolidation within UK industry to rationalise the numbers of positions to the available labour in the country at this present time. So, is this going to be a “good thing” for the economic upturn which is so desired by government, industry leaders and UK plc in general?
To fully investigate the matter will take more than a few sentences which are written here, and the causes are several which will need more thorough detail and explanation, but here are a few. Successive UK Conservative (and possibly other party) governments have suggested that our economy should be a “high income, low tax” one. High income suggests that these roles will be supportive of “high tech, skilled within either IT, engineering or service industry roles”, (ok – there will be many more, but just go with this principle here!)
The obvious follow-on is do these positions exist and if so, do we have the right skills being taught by our educational establishments? And this is where you almost come to a bit of a dead-end because I can’t find any information which correlates between the two.
I read about such initiatives as “The National Skills Fund”, that it provides for free “skills training” to level 2 and beyond that basic training, you need a sponsor and on-job real-time experience. For most small business, (SME’s) i.e. 99% of all organisations in the UK, this will be a bit of a burden. And most of these (4.1 million out of 5.6 million) are self-employed sole proprietor concerns anyway.
In 2005 we saw the start of an influx of workers from the EU and coming to work in our unskilled, production and service areas of our economy. I thought at the time that those workers who were then serving me drinks and meals in bars and restaurants would eventually be part of our permanent national workforce and managing some of the services we require.
And that is how the UK has managed much of our economy and for well over 70 years, from the wind-rush generation to the modern day. We have accepted and imported our growth and skills. It’s not a bad thing. We are one of the most culturally-diverse nations in the developed world, and has enabled a new style of “Great Britain”.
I also ask myself, have we in the UK become “technologically lazy”. We seem to be users of this technology and not establishing ourselves in developing this. We use products such as software designed for business and personal use, but not investing in computer code and creating new products ourselves, (although I accept that the games entertainment industry in the UK is highly competitive, but only represents a small niche area of the overall economy).
To summarise my thoughts, we are going to have to look seriously at how we meet the needs of a modern economy, moving on from our historic and traditional values to the workplaces of the future, wherever they may be.
This inevitably mean that we must start with a new generation, educating from school and innovating with new technologies. Unfortunately, this will be no quick-fix and may take another generation to overcome.
