A skills shortage is hitting UK employers hard, according to research from the Open University (OU), [1] with three in five firms saying the problem has worsened over the past year – and more than half expecting it to get even more serious in the next 12 months.
All in all, 91% of employers have been affected in some way by the shortage, with 56% struggling to fill management posts in the past year. This has led to a deployment of costly solutions, with organisations spending £1.2 billion in recruitment fees in 2017, plus £1.5bn on temp staff. A further £2.2bn has been dedicated to salary rises.
OU corporate director David Willet said: “Essentially, we have a supply and demand issue, which is seeing employers pay more to recruit or plug gaps with temporary workers – at a total cost of £6.3bn. But this approach is treating the symptoms rather than the illness. The reason business leaders are forced to spend so much is down to the fundamental lack of high-level skills. Organisations need to take a more sustainable, long-term approach, building talent through training rather than buying it in.”
The OU findings follow a recent survey from the Learning and Work Institute, [2] which found that just 37% of UK workers had done any training at all in the past three years.
The organisation’s deputy research and development director Fiona Aldridge said: “It is more vital than ever that adults are learning, retraining [and] developing their skills. We are living in an environment where there is more change than ever before. However well your initial education prepares you for the world of work, if you have a 50 year career ahead of you and maybe a 70 or 80-year life, there is no way you are going to be on top of all of the things you need to know and learn and can benefit from.”
A skills shortage is hitting UK employers hard, according to research from the Open University (OU), [1] with three in five firms saying the problem has worsened over the past year – and more than half expecting it to get even more serious in the next 12 months.
All in all, 91% of employers have been affected in some way by the shortage, with 56% struggling to fill management posts in the past year. This has led to a deployment of costly solutions, with organisations spending £1.2 billion in recruitment fees in 2017, plus £1.5bn on temp staff. A further £2.2bn has been dedicated to salary rises.
OU corporate director David Willet said: “Essentially, we have a supply and demand issue, which is seeing employers pay more to recruit or plug gaps with temporary workers – at a total cost of £6.3bn. But this approach is treating the symptoms rather than the illness. The reason business leaders are forced to spend so much is down to the fundamental lack of high-level skills. Organisations need to take a more sustainable, long-term approach, building talent through training rather than buying it in.”
The OU findings follow a recent survey from the Learning and Work Institute, [2] which found that just 37% of UK workers had done any training at all in the past three years.
The organisation’s deputy research and development director Fiona Aldridge said: “It is more vital than ever that adults are learning, retraining [and] developing their skills. We are living in an environment where there is more change than ever before. However well your initial education prepares you for the world of work, if you have a 50 year career ahead of you and maybe a 70 or 80-year life, there is no way you are going to be on top of all of the things you need to know and learn and can benefit from.”
What vital points should leaders know about training that would help to ease their powerful urge to recruit their way through the skills shortage?
The Institute of Leadership & Management's head of research, policy and standards Kate Cooper says: “I struggle to understand why organisations aren’t looking more at the potential within them. It was certainly evident when we did some research three years ago on multi-generational workforces, and it’s even more evident now. You do not finish your education at the age of 18 or 21, and you do need to keep on learning. People must be encouraged and motivated to engage in learning, and rewarded for doing so. It’s got to be the sort of behaviour that we expect: ‘It’s what we do – we’re always engaging with new ideas.’”
Cooper stresses: “rather than relying purely on off-site training, where you take part in external sessions that will have useful – but also, inevitably, less-useful – elements, I would urge organisations to introduce a learning hour or half-hour every week, where there is no limit on what staff are allowed to investigate. Rally staff around the excitement of regularly unearthing new things to think about. Make them accountable for that by encouraging them to explain what they’ve learned. Finding out about something is just the beginning. When you share it with someone else, you are making new sense of it for yourself. You are understanding it more clearly through the process of explanation. And you are helping a colleague learn something new, too.
“So that normalises learning in your own organisation: it doesn’t happen somewhere else – it happens all around you in the workplace. It’s no good saying that it’s informal and social, therefore it doesn’t require resources or attention. You have to manage it really well, and I’d say the way to do it is by making people accountable for their learning, and by being interested in it. It matters, and it’s part of the performance management dynamic.”
Cooper notes: “always look ahead to see where your next raft of internal talent that could take on greater responsibilities is coming from. Search for that cohort in different parts of your organisation. Lots of young people show exceptional aptitude for sports at very young ages – football is a good example. According to author Michael Calvin, who investigated youth football in his book No Hunger in Paradise, [3] out of all the boys who enter academies as the age of nine, less than half of 1% turn professional.
“Indeed, of the 1.5 million boys who are playing in the academy system at any one time, only 180 will make it to the Premier League: a success rate of just 0.012%. So, the talent is there – it’s just not being nurtured properly. In sports and business alike, we are so admiring of natural talent that we often forget about the discipline, hard work and self-belief that’s involved in delivering it to the top – which is why leaders are recruiting readymade talent off the peg, rather than looking at who they could develop in their existing staff rosters.”
She adds: “you have to give people a chance. Bring them off the subs’ bench for a few minutes, and then a few minutes more in the next game, and so on, until they’ve honed their talent by doing. It’s all about getting that little bit better, all the time.”
For further thoughts on developing talent, check out these learning resources from the Institute
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