The UK: There's no better place to work...

Despite the downturn of recent years the UK government is now trumpeting the UK as offering the best labour market of any developed economy in the world - however, for the technology sector the picture isn't quite so clear cut or rosy.

According to Des Browne, minister for work, the UK is enjoying the highest levels of employment and lowest rates of unemployment, as well as boasting employment levels across all regions which exceed the EU average.

"The continued strength of the UK economy under this government means the number of people in work has hit a new record high," said Browne. "We are close to achieving our ambition of three-quarters of working age people in jobs."

Browne added that unemployment is at its lowest in almost 30 years.

Despite the fact there are still large numbers of unemployed, the problem of unfilled vacancies is still a major issue according to the Office of National Statistics.

And this is obvious nowhere more so than with the IT sector, where 'retraining' and 'skills crisis' are still phrases which crop up regularly during discussions on the state of the market.

Certainly there are a great many techies who would say that 'situations vacant', far from being a good measure of the health of a labour market, are a damning indictment on problems with educating and training the right candidates to do the job.

According to the most recent e-Skills UK findings, 57 per cent of employers don't believe their staff have the right IT skills.

And there is little sign of improvement if today's budget is to go by. Chancellor Gordon Brown today failed to announce any tax incentives for companies retraining staff and bringing in initiatives to improve employees' skill sets, raising fears that the UK will soon be left trailing.

Richard Barrington, head of government affairs and public policy at Sun Microsystems, said: "I think they missed a chance here. We need a lot of training and re-training to keep up the UK skills base."