Skills Shortage in the United Kingdom

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In the contemporary world known for its rapid development a number of spheres of life are changing very quickly. The causes of such changes are mainly technological progress, scientific discoveries, social alterations, and the process of globalisation. Business world and labor market constantly undergo various metamorphoses that shift the balance in them and move some of the jobs to the centre or to the periphery of their professional fields. While some jobs become less popular, the others grow completely out of demand. Besides, quick technological development quickly starts to create new job opportunities, and since some of the technologies are very new, the number of specialists able to operate them properly is very insufficient. As a result, skills shortage today is a growing global concern which is addressed in a number of ways. The United Kingdom as one of the worlds most advanced states has faced the issue of skills shortage some time ago.

Therefore, a number of experts in the UK have been working on plans concerning the ways of reduction of skills shortage. Currently, the list of professions who are experiencing the biggest skills shortage in the United Kingdom includes physical and biological scientists and biochemists, directors in mining and energy spheres, social and natural science professionals, civil, mechanical, electrical, and electronics engineers, and also design and production engineers as well as many other professionals (Tier 2 Shortage Occupation List Government-approved version 2014). Besides, the IT business, programming, and software development severely lack employees. Moreover, the spheres that have been undergoing skills shortage for decades are medicine and environment. These are just a few of the professions that need more skillful specialists right now. Other fields affected by skills shortage are art, aircraft, construction, sales, and restaurant industry.

An Overview of the Issue

Skills shortage in the field of information technologies (IT) is something that many users and consumers experienced at least a couple of times over the last several years. Business owners and corporation managers have been affected by this issue for decades. The contemporary business leaders are convinced that the recovery of economy in the United Kingdom is massively held back by the problem of skills shortage (Wall 2014). It is worth mentioning that skills shortage in the UK has been growing at a terrifying pace lately. Quantitative research demonstrates that the number of areas affected by skills shortage in 2013 counted nine fields, and it is shocking how this number changed over just one year today the UK has forty three skills shortage areas (Wall 2014).

Month after month skills shortage is getting more and more severe, particularly affecting high-level skills professions in such spheres as digital technologies, engineering, science, and construction. Wall (2014) provides an explanation of the mechanism of skills shortage in the United Kingdom using the field of construction as an example. It is mentioned that initially there already has been a shortage of good professionals, which reduced the demand for the services of construction companies. Businessmen stopped investing into this sphere and, as a result, the employees turned to other fields using their skills as basis for new specialties. When the government started to direct funding to keep the sphere of construction going, the shortage became even more significant. This way, it turns out that over the next four years the number of professionals needed in this field will be twenty per cent higher than it used to be in 2010-2013.

Media Stories Covering the Issue

The article posted on the online portal of The Guardian elaborates on the outcomes of the measures taken to improve the situation in construction business. As the payments of the construction workers were increased in order to attract more people to the profession, the skills shortage started to reduce and the building processes started all around the country, yet this affected a number of other aspects of this field. For example, the prices for housing grew a lot and the contractors faced a severe shortage of building supplies (Allen 2014). The Telegraph is another online news platform that covered skills shortage issues in the UK stating that when it comes to technologies, programming, graphic design, and coding every successful business owner complains that the people they hire do not have skills required today (Burn-Callandar 2014).

The knowledge needed in the contemporary world is not provided at the modern educational institutions for the same reason they simply do not have enough people to teach such subjects and disciplines. The recent surveys show that by the beginning of 2015 around ninety per cent of all business organisations were in need for skillful IT specialists, besides, not only the UK, but the whole Europe soon is about to face a shortage of about seven hundred thousand information technologies professionals this year (Burn-Callandar 2014). The financial website of the year called This Is Money reports that skills shortage in the United Kingdom became worse in such sectors as medicine, engineering, and the IT, besides, since the overall mass of workers does not possess the required skills to be hired, the growth of employment rates started to quickly slow down by the beginning of 2015 (Canocchi 2014).

How the Issue Affects Organisations

One of the main causes of the current skills shortage in the sector of information technologies has been affected by the mixed messages sent to the IT workers earlier. Skills shortage in the IT field started to be rather acute by the end of 1990s, this happened because through the 1970s and 1980s the students and practitioners of this sector were getting discouraging messages when the states all around the world started to overlook this filed and direct funds elsewhere (Alexander 2009). Over time, the experienced and new specialists started to believe that this career did not have future. This way, the IT gradually became less popular as a choice of a profession for the students. The rapid development in the fields of programming, digital technologies, and social media increased the need for skilled IT professionals, while the number of good specialists remained very small, so what used to be the shortage of three hundred thousand specialists today turned into a number exceeding half a million.

Such drastic shortage is serious for the contemporary organisations. Recent survey conducted by the CBI demonstrated that thirty nine per cent of the British companies are already struggling to hire employees with appropriate levels of skills and forty one per cent are convinced that the issues of skills shortage will face them within the next several years (Tackling the IT skills shortage 2013). The business leaders and the economists of the United Kingdom are aware that the IT sector is one of the major factors determining the future prosperity of the country. Besides, this is currently one of the spheres with the growing competition; this is why skilled professionals are in constant demand. The economic and business consultants recommend that both affected and expecting to get affected by the skills shortage companies start to address this problem now. One of the first ways to tackle this issue was the attraction of foreign professionals. This was expected to maximise the number of wanted employees and also allow the organisations to avoid paying large amounts of money to the domestic workers (Tackling the IT skills shortage 2013).

The problem that occurred after this strategy was put into practice had to do with language, culture and time zone differences. These problems quickly outweighed the savings. Besides, the growing development and importance of the IT sphere of the organisations soon created one more problem. The companies that decided to outsource their IT sectors quickly became dependant on the outsourcers so much that the latter started to be able to dictate their own conditions to the companies. As a result, forty eight per cent of the companies using this strategy had to terminate this process or reverse it, which caused more spending (Tackling the IT skills shortage 2013). Under the constant pressure of skills shortage and a threat to go out of business British corporations have started to look for more ways to address this issue.

Reuters reports that in the summer of 2014 a lot of businesses increased their salaries in order to attract new professionals, young people and experienced workers, and this strategy was noticed to influence and reduce skills shortage (Little 2014). The research by the KPMG based on a poll of three hundred of professionals working in the IT and human resources revealed that the companies currently are facing a severe shortage of cyber security professionals and this is why they are thinking to start hiring former hackers; this strategy is deemed to be a successful way to get ahead of cyber criminals (Ashford 2014).

Previous, Similar Issues and Theoretical/Text book Principles that are Linked to the Issue

A couple of decades ago the issue of serious skills shortage in the information technologies sector also existed. Back then it was mainly addressed by means of payment increase and attraction of resources. In fact, this strategy was the main one to be used in other professional fields such as medicine and construction business. The shortage of medical practitioners, nurses especially, has been one of the major issues not only in the United Kingdom, but all around the world. The main factors causing shortage in this profession were the workload and unsafe environment nurses have to deal with on the daily basis. The causes of low job satisfaction among nurses are lack of recognition, excessive workload resulting in exhaustion and burnout, low morale, lack of autonomy to name a few (Duffield & OBrien-Pallas 2003).

These factors not only drove the existing nursing practitioners out of the field, they also discouraged new specialists from choosing this profession. One of the main principles shaping the skills shortage and unemployment rates in the UK is adult illiteracy. This term is not used often these days; it is frequently replaced with the concept of functional illiteracy, which stands for the inability of adult people to perform the majority of jobs due to the extremely low level of education and literacy. Functionally illiterate adults compose sixteen per cent of the population of England (How many illiterate adults are there in England? 2011). Modern skills shortage in the IT sector is caused by the loss of staff that is not ready to be replaced because the new professionals are not available; this way, the shortage is caused by the new equipment installed and the lack of knowledge as to its operation among the existing staff. The old way of addressing skills shortage that is based on the raise of salaries cannot help the situation the IT sector is facing. Due to this, the contemporary business world came up with a number of new solutions.

Analysis of the Techniques that Have Been Used and Might Be Used to Manage or Solve the Business Issue

The skills shortage issues in the United Kingdom started to aggravate rapidly for a reason. For a while this problem had been suppressed in the country due to its economic recession and a low demand for employees (Groom 2013). After that, starting with 2013, the leaders of the UK started active job creation, which increased the rates of hiring, employment showed growth by five hundred thousand cases. This process revealed serious difficulties related to significant insufficiency of human resources in such sectors as engineering, construction, medicine, and the IT. Recruiters also report that there are predicted skills shortage in such professions as chef, driver, and carer (Groom 2013). While shortage in nursing can be effectively addressed with the help of policies improving working conditions of the employees, and in the professions of a driver and a chef the raise of salaries would be a way out, the situation in the IT sector is much more complicated. One of the basic causes of the IT skills shortage is lack of appropriate education among the job seekers, besides, fewer and fewer young British people start to prefer this career and study to become the IT professionals (Fears growing over potential IT skills shortage 2015).

The overall number of IT specialists under thirty years old in the UK has fallen from thirty three to nineteen per cent over the period between 2001 and 2010 (Fears growing over potential IT skills shortage 2015). Once this trend occurred, the business leaders started to address it immediately. One of the main strategies employed by the organisations was to obtain required human resources abroad. This was not difficult because over the last decade the European Union accepted several new members, besides the immigration policies in the UK are rather relaxed when Labour government was in charge. Global companies actively attracted employees from non-EU countries such as India. This strategy had one serious disadvantage for the domestic workers who started to experience the reduction of earning capacity, but since the UK initially had not have enough skilled IT resources, this strategy has been viewed as the major plan (Fears growing over potential IT skills shortage 2015).

The latest tendency to reduce the rates of immigration to the UK complicated the rules of hiring non-EU citizens. As a result, many businesses found themselves unable to access suitable employees. The only way to address that issue was to offshore new departments, which again negatively impacts the employment opportunity for the UK specialists, and also reduces the tax revenue for the British Treasury. This way, while the United Kingdom businesses were actively and effectively filling in their gaps concerning the IT professionals using the resources located abroad, the domestic quality of the IT specialists at best remained unchanged or even worsened. Analysing the former strategies employed by the UK companies to address skills shortage in the IT sector makes it obvious that the business organisations did not have time to invest into new practitioners, instead they preferred to obtain resources quickly. This led to the loss of tax revenues for the state, increased the level of unemployment, attracted more non-EU citizens, discouraged the domestic professionals and created a negative reputation for the whole field of It in Britain.

Recommendations for Organisations Affected

It is quite obvious that the need for the IT professionals in the UK will not go away in the next several decades. This is why the issue of skills shortage needs to be tackled. To solve this problem properly the UK youth needs to be encouraged to pursue careers in the IT, software development, programming, coding, and graphic design. This will require a number of highly professional training institutions with high-quality educators teaching the future professionals. Besides, in order to improve their earning capacity the currently unemployed citizens could get trained and acquire new IT professions (Stephenson 2014). This way, the job centres need to stop pushing the unemployed into the low-qualification specialties and instead start directing the seekers to the training and courses that would guarantee them better paid jobs in the contemporary world. Both small and big business organisations of the United Kingdom today are recommended by the British Chambers of Commerce to invest into the training of workforce since professional training is the key factor contributing to the improvement of performance, growth, and productivity (BCC Workforce Survey 2014: Firms investing to counter persistent skills shortages 2014).

Ninety two per cent of companies and firms that took part of the BCC Workforce Survey conducted in 2014 reported the presence of skills shortage among their employees. Eighty per cent of the participating businesses agreed that training of the workforce is the main driver of progress for them and admitted that they already had plans concerning the investment into such trainings. Companies may provide training internally or hire specialists from outside of the firms. The challenges the firms face trying to provide professional training to the employees are the difficulties freeing the workers for the time of training, the cost of it, or lack of appropriate courses (BCC Workforce Survey 2014: Firms investing to counter persistent skills shortages 2014).

Conclusion

In conclusion, being the home of such outstanding professionals in the field of computer technologies and the IT as Tim Berners-Lee and Maurice Wilkes, Great Britain has always been known as one of the most technologically and professionally advanced states when it came to the latest developments. This way, the country possesses what can be viewed as a rather significant legacy in computing, which cannot and should not be overlooked or thrown away. If the current skills and education shortage in the field of information technologies are not handled in the nearest years, the country would be likely to fall back in technological progress as there simply would not be enough specialists to carry it out. Besides, since the vast majority of businesses in the contemporary world are strongly connected to the IT field, without an appropriate number of IT professionals, the country would quickly go into stagnation. This is why the policies promoting the IT careers to the young people and unemployed citizens should start being put into practice today.

Reference List

Alexander, S. 2009. Origins of a shortfall, InfoWorld, vol. 21, no. 6, pp.93-94.

Allen, K. 2014, Skills shortage fears temper surge in UK construction.

Ashford, W. 2014, UK firms consider hiring ex-hackers to solve skills shortage. Web.

BCC Workforce Survey 2014: Firms investing to counter persistent skills shortages 2014, British Chambers of Commerce. Web.

Burn-Callandar, R. 2014, What the skills shortage means for UK SMEs. Web.

Canocchi, C. 2014, Employment growth slows down as UK companies warn of worsening skills shortage but pay creeps up.

Duffield, C. & OBrien-Pallas, L. 2003, The causes and consequences of nursing shortages: a helicopter view of the research, Australian Health Review, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 192-199.

Fears growing over potential IT skills shortage 2015, HAYS. Web.

Groom, B. 2013, Employment growth signals skills shortage. Web.

How many illiterate adults are there in England? 2011, National Literacy Trust.

Little, T. 2014, UK recruiters say rising salaries reflect skills shortage.

Stephenson, N. 2014, Skills Shortages Hold Back the UK So Why Cant the Unemployed Get Training?

Tackling the IT skills shortage 2013, BCS.

Tier 2 Shortage Occupation List Government-approved version 2014. Gov.uk. Web.

Wall, M. 2014, Skills shortages holding back the UKs economic recovery.

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