“Skills, recruitment, retention.”

Last week I asked a selection of businesses, from very large to very small, what their biggest pressures were. This was the answer. In fact, this has been the most common answer to that question for some time.

Put these things together and what you get is a shortage of skilled, enthusiastic workers, across a whole range of disciplines. It wasn’t just coders these businesses were lacking. It was warehouse workers, construction trades, drivers, service professionals. Across the board, there’s a dearth of people available to fill roles.

There’s been plenty of analysis of this issue over the last couple of years. It’s not exactly new. But people have come to lots of different conclusions about the cause.

Is it Brexit?

That’s certainly part of the problem. That’s the conclusion that both the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development came to. And the Bank of England. Brexit made the UK a much less accessible (and frankly less attractive) place to work for young Europeans. People who were helping to overcome the structural gaps in industries like construction, logistics, agriculture and hospitality.

But, it’s not like we actually shut the doors to the UK, much as some politicians might want to. Net migration in 2020 actually exceeded pre-Brexit numbers. And it has climbed since – albeit in a fairly unstructured way in response to international events (e.g. the war in Ukraine). While the profile of people in employment who were not born in the UK has changed (more from outside the EU, fewer from inside), the total numbers have still increased. Given the state of the economy, you might not think that demand would be growing fast enough to make such demands on the UK workforce.

Is it COVID?

One of the common explanations of the shortage of skilled workers is high levels of economic inactivity. There was a perception post-COVID that lots of people went on furlough and never came back. Why? Because they were perhaps still ill, because they retired, or because they rediscovered a life beyond work. In reality, it seems COVID just masked a more structural problem: the changing shape of our population.

As the latest ONS figures show, the reasons many more people were economically inactive post COVID was just because of the life stage they were at. They were either studying, or retired.

This isn’t to say that long COVID symptoms haven’t had an impact. The pandemic clearly affected many people, and killed people too. But the big driver of change was just people hitting certain milestones in life.

Is it cultural?

One thing COVID and the lockdown certainly did was catalyse a change in working culture. Our expectations as employees, for quality of life, do seem to be higher. Anecdotally this isn’t just about ‘laptop workers’ (something that seems to be approaching a pejorative term). Clients tell me that expectations are higher for warehouse workers and on the factory floor. And why shouldn’t they be? Challenging as it is to reset expectations as bosses – and the people spending money to meet these expectations.

People are less willing to jump at a job, any job. And that’s a good thing. It sounds counter-intuitive in a country facing a clear cost of living crisis, stagnating wages, reduced public spending, and strikes. But it’s a sign of wealth. To some extent at least, we can afford to be more choosy.

Is it education?

Employers complain that not only can they not find enough people, the people they can find are simply not ready for work. This research comes up over and over again, with conversations about core skills, mental health, and motivation.

Of course this can all sound a bit dated. Surely employers have been complaining about grads and apprentices for decades? They have.

But there is an issue nonetheless. It’s not necessarily that our institutions aren’t teaching the right things (though we could always make improvements). It’s that they can’t, and even if they could, they couldn’t produce sufficient numbers of skilled people to fulfill demand.

Future-proof skills

Regular readers will know that I’m in the middle of producing a podcast series on the skills you need to ‘future-proof your career’. I would love to see schools and universities focus a little more on these skills. But even if they did, they wouldn’t be producing people ready for work. They’d be producing people ready to learn. People with a great set of core skills, ready to learn the specific technical skills they need to fulfill a particular role.

That technical training is very hard to deliver in an education institution, because what is needed changes so fast. As one academic admitted to me, everything he teaches is already out of date. And the moment his grads enter the workforce, they’re going to be back on another steep learning curve.

This, for me, is where the crux of the problem lies.

Learning and development

I met with a group of people in learning and development functions in medium to large corporations recently. They were a fantastic bunch, enthusiastic about their roles. But though I know this is a function that has been under financial pressure in the recent past, I was still surprised at how pressured their roles were.

Many of them told me that they now had a shared role, covering both L&D and diversity and inclusion. That’s a lot of ground for one or two people to cover in an organisation of tens of thousands. They told me that they are often only able to do the bare minimum. That talent strategy and training are often misaligned, if they even collaborate.

We don’t help ourselves

So, why do we have such a persistent and damaging skills gap? It’s about age, it’s about immigration, it’s about quality of work and quality of life. But it’s also about our lack of a joined up approach to tackling the issue. Not through government or education institutions, but as employers. We need to rethink somewhat the social contract between employer and employee and recognise that if there are skills we want to see in the market, we might have to invest in teaching them to our workforce. We need a much more coherent talent strategy. We need greater investment in our learning functions, accepting that part of the role of the employer, is to be an educator.

Yes, this will trigger all the old complaints: “What if i invest in them and they leave?” The old rejoinder was always “But what if you don’t invest in them and they stay?”

Now it’s more like mutually assured destruction. If we don’t all  start investing more, what then?