A better skills future – but not tomorrow

04 November, 2021

We are back to our opening point. If there is a chronic or acute skills shortage now, even with the best of initiatives – and there are many good ones; The Lifetime Skills Guarantee, T-Levels, The Skills Accelerator Programme, a new Student Finance system, The Skills and Post-16 Education Bill etc – it will still take the order of ten years before it impacts the day-to-day running of UK businesses. Indeed, during that period, industry is being encouraged to invest heavily in these new initiatives, which can only increase costs not revenue. This expenditure is very worthy and a good investment for the future, but the skills crisis is ‘now’, not in ten years and the thought of a highly skilled, highly paid, low tax economy, whilst very uplifting in a world much in need of some positive news, is at best challenging.

BFPA and other EAMA Associations recently commissioned a survey in conjunction with Enginuity and the Gatsby Foundation, into the current skills landscape. The results were many but unsurprisingly, key findings were:

• more than three-quarters of companies have major skills gaps;

• those firms that do not perceive a skills gap tend to be small;

• an exceptionally wide range of specialist skill requirements were identified;

• the most common gap was in digital skills; older workers have many strengths but can be slow to adopt new technology;

• the biggest impacts of recruitment and skills gaps are increased workload on other staff and reduced productivity;

• the most common training was in-house, undertaken by three-quarters of surveyed companies, followed by training from equipment suppliers, used by half the firms surveyed.

• A small number of firms sent staff to their European parent companies for training;

• skills planning tends to be short-term, although one third of companies say they do have a long-term skills strategy;

The report goes on to make some recommendations as to what companies might do in the short term to help address the skills shortage. Interested parties may wish to contact the British Fluid Power Association (BFPA) for further details, but one thing is certain; the well-intended and worthy goals of the current Government skills strategy has to be considered as being a mediumto long term solution and is not a shortterm panacea for prosperity. That will only come from companies making themselves more attractive to the good, skilled and much sought-after employees, in comparison with their competitors.

‘Survival of the fittest’

There will be winners and losers and until there are more skilled individuals coming on to the employment market it will be a case of the ‘survival of the fittest’ and rather too many UK companies needing to ‘get back to the gym.

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