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Leader: UK labour market so healthy it's in critical condition?
Do we have vacancies or a skills crisis? You decide...

By silicon.com

Published: Wednesday 17 March 2004

It has become clear today that one person's 'situation vacant' is another's 'skills crisis'.

The government claims low unemployment and a large number of unfilled vacancies is a sign of a healthy labour market and therefore a good thing - and it would be if all the people still out of work slotted in perfectly to those jobs, but sadly they don't.

So on one hand you could say the UK work force is spoilt for choice, but realistically and slightly less optimistically we may have to concede that really the UK is ill-equipped to develop, especially in highly skill-dependent fields such as IT.

You could almost liken it to a restaurant with no customers boasting about the near-100 per cent real-term growth potential.

And the government today dashed any hopes of a turnaround in this state of affairs when it failed to announce any new tax breaks or further incentives for companies retraining the UK workforce - a measure which would have started bridging the skills gap.

The extent of that skills gap, according to e-Skills UK, puts dissatisfaction with staff training within UK companies at 57 per cent - meaning, in short, that more than half the UK's employers don't think their staff 'cut the mustard'.

Richard Barrington, head of government affairs and public policy at Sun Microsystems, was certainly unimpressed with the news from Number 11.

"I think they missed a chance here. We need a lot of training and re-training to keep up the UK skills base," he told silicon.com.

We couldn't agree more, but as long as the government equates empty seats with opportunity we'll remain waiting for an improvement.