Well, it’s official: according to the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, British businesses are increasingly afraid of the impact of the skills shortage.
If you haven’t heard about the skills shortage, you’ve probably been living under a rock – or maybe you’ve been frozen in carbonite for a decade or two. By the way, the Spice Girls aren’t popular any more. More shocking than that though is the fact that the number of skilled and qualified workers out there has plummeted over the past year, and now that the economy has finally recovered to the point where businesses can actually start expanding once more it turns out that the staff they would need to do so simply aren’t available.
Now, normally this wouldn’t be much of a problem, at least in the short term, as firms could simply rely upon flexible workers such as umbrella company contractors and freelancers. However, interim workers simply aren’t anything besides a sticking plaster over a much more serious wound, and now British businesses are feeling like they’re going to bleed out soon if something isn’t done according to the REC’s newest outlook on jobs.
The industry body discovered that 31 per cent of businesses polled said that if they had the opportunity to bring in new work they simply couldn’t be able to handle it as they’re already at their capacity. The only way they could possibly increase that capacity would be to hire on some new workers – and we all know how well an endeavour like that would turn out.
The problem goes deeper than that though, as the REC also found that a rather startling 54 per cent of survey respondents indicated that while they’re not at full capacity yet they are very close. In other words, they might be able to take on a bit more new work before having to hire on more workers, but it certainly isn’t going to be much before they hit that wall.
So yes, it’s rapidly approaching a rather dire situation for the British economy. All our hard work to claw ourselves back from the precipice of the recession could go up in smoke if this skills shortage continues! I think that we may have to soon take on some drastic measures to get things humming along nicely again, though for the life of me I can’t possibly imagine what those measures might be.
