Employers are struggling to fill vacancies due to a lack of skills, qualifications and experience among applicants, according to the latest Employer Skills Survey (ESS).
The Employer Skills Survey 2017, carried out by IFF Research and published by the Department for Education today, shows that two-thirds of so-called “hard-to-fill” vacancies were caused, at least in part, by this.
The report also says that the skills employers found to be lacking among applicants ranged across both technical and practical skills, and people and personal skills.
“On the technical side, employers reported a lack of digital skills, skills related to operational aspects of the role, and a lack of complex analytical skills. The main people and personal skills lacking predominantly related to self-management skills, management and leadership, and sales and customer handling skills,” says the survey report.
Skills gaps: Concerns over quality of training
Just less than one in eight employers also reported skills gaps in their existing workforce, with an estimated 1.27 million staff lacking full proficiency in their role. That equals 4.4 per cent of the total UK workforce. “This continues a trend of a steady decline over the course of the ESS series both in the proportion of employers reporting skills gaps and in the proportion of the workforce considered to lack proficiency,” according to the report.
Two-thirds of employers in the UK provided training for their staff over the past 12 months, and the proportion of staff trained in that time also remained consistent with previous years at 62 per cent. However, the survey shows there were “indications that the quantity and type of training may not be being maintained”.
“For instance, whilst the number of staff trained has increased, the total number of training days provided has decreased, hence the average number of days training per trainee has decreased from 6.8 days in 2015 to 6.4 days in 2017.
“There was also a decrease in the number of staff being trained to nationally recognised qualifications, from 3.5 million in 2015 to 3.3 million in 2017.”
