The last time I wrote, I spoke specifically of people working as IT professionals and concluded at the end of my piece the need for people within the IT industry to be adaptable citing the rise of such factors as The Cloud (doing your computing online as opposed to having applications on your computer), changing the demands for skills in this sector. This is something that we can see coming, it is a technology that has been emerging for a number of years and data from IT professionals, recruiters, managers and so on all give us key indicators as to how and when the uptake and shift in skills will occur. This is one industry, an industry that I understand in detail but is by no means the breadth of employment in this country. It is just a small segment of employment in the UK.
Other factors affecting the employment market are less predictable. This now painfully long economic recession has had a wholesale impact on the work of people across every single industry. The discourse is centered upon the young, the older generation, the low paid. All groups have suffered. Many of the older generation have been badly let down, struggling to find work whilst the young fresh faced, fresh skilled but inexperienced struggle to find work as well.
At the same time, we see data that comes from employers. On more than one occasion in recent weeks, I have seen headlines that read along the lines of “We have the quantity of candidates but lack the quality that we need”. Now quantity is of course directly measurable quality is something that would appear to be somewhat more arbitrary.
Returning to the economic downturn and its impact, I suspect that most of us know people who have been hit hard. People who have lost jobs, gotten themselves caught out in some way or another as a consequence of the recession. What becomes of all these people? People who mid-career find themselves suddenly exposed, weighty mortgage and children in tow. The methods by which people in mid-career find work – word of mouth, associates, customers, competitors and so on are largely stripped away as the job is lost, the individual becomes isolated. The end result is that the mid-careerists’, find themselves at the mercy of recruitment processes. Often the skill set of the individual has become non-specific. By nature, the mid-careerist has become a specialist, working within a niche whose skills do not necessarily come up that often in CV scan searches.
The mid-careerist has to make themselves competitive again. This means training, this means getting new skills or at least getting a certificate that validates the existing skill set of the individual. This is where the challenge lies. Because this costs money, money which as we know, the majority of people in the UK just don’t have, much less the unemployed. It is here that we see people start to head into decline. It is here where we see people who have paid thousands upon thousands into the treasury’s coffers suddenly, in the most foul of manners let down by that very system that is meant to support us. Thrown into the system that is the run by that most desperate, expensive and miserable excuse for a government function, the Department of Work and Pensions.
I know people, a number of bright, highly skilled and innovative individuals who have had careers in which they have earned £100k plus per annum. Along came the downturn and after years of commitment they were for reasons ‘economic’ in rationale shown the wide open door to pastures new. Now in normal times, this wouldn’t be so hard, a round of recruitment agencies, a month of struggling with the mortgage a bit, a few interviews and within a few weeks these individuals are indeed grazing in a new pasture, driven by new objectives and helping another business through their skills, innovation, experience, insight and hard work.
But these are not normal times. Recovery, if that is even a fair description of the situation we are in at the moment is slow, almost stagnant. Employers are not getting the candidates with the skills whilst job candidates despite having the ability are not getting the training that they need to tick the boxes that get them their next role. There’s something wrong. Jobs are creeping up in some sectors but, the workforce’s skills come from a sector that is yet to recover. Net result? The workforce remains in a position of redundancy.
But for the skilled individual who now needs to retrain, what is on offer? Well based on the people I have spoken to who have had to deal with the lumbering beast that is the DWP. I’m afraid to report, it seems that there is pretty much nothing.
A friend of mine who has been a £100kp.a. project manager in IT for 30 years now but has never qualified, has recently found it difficult to find work. Talented, skilled, able to run projects on time and on budget involving millions of pounds of money and anything from 10 – 100 people on a team without a piece of paper this is not worth much anymore. Suddenly 30 years of experience means nothing when pitted against a 22 year old with a funny haircut and a bit of paper derived from a 5 day residential training course.
This friend, with four children is forced into the less than loving arms of the DWP and engages with the seemingly anchronistic Job Centre. Clutching communications from employment agencies, communications which advise that in the current climate he needs to get his PRINCE 2 project management qualifications to find work. My friend ventures this information to the Job Centre agent and requests that this be funded.
The return on investment is clear. It costs around £1,000 to do the course. With the ticket, he earns £300 per day at a minimum, likely 20% more and pays at least £120 per day in tax. In less than 10 days the state gets its money back and everyone is happy. Great Britain Ltd returns to profit. Alas, he is denied.
This is ridiculous. Already it has cost the state more to deny this person than to allow. But of course the job centre does present him roles ‘that he must apply for’ -flogging Kit-Kat’s to sweet shops, working as a barman or selling wine that nobody wants to drink on a commission only basis. He won’t be able to pay his mortgage should he get the exec position with the chocolate bar manufacturer but that doesn’t matter, he is off the government’s books.
With his family to go homeless in the next few months, never able to raise the capital required for that £1,000 project managers course that consolidates his expertise he is now caught in a trap that is going to be incredibly difficult to escape. A career loan, deducted at the point of PAYE must be better than the descent that the current system actively promotes? We do it for students? Why not for people later in life?
Now I talk again about IT because it is a market that I know about. Yet this is happening across the board, across industry. People in construction, chemicals, engineering, retail, finance and every other industry are experiencing exactly the same set of issues. It is an incredibly disturbing reality for thousands upon thousands of British families.
So as the shiny faced Cameron, so used to licking the cream, with experience of little other than privilege, mews about getting people with cancer back to work, there appear to be some very significant inadequacies in his government’s policies. Not least policies that provide the British taxpayer with access to relevant, contemporary and practical training that is accessible not only to the young but also to those who are unemployed and the employed stuck in dead end jobs. We are not talking about a 3 year degree courses here. Neither are we talking about some ridiculous ‘computer skills’ course designed for a period in time not long after Yosser Hughes was on our screens. A 5 day course, a 10 day course – that is all it is going to take for most people. Courses that help to bring and maintain prosperity and opportunity for families. Skills training that in most cases costs less than 3% of the recent Downing Street kitchen upgrade that those who need help today have paid for.
This will help get Britain competitive again. Employers will start to get the quality of candidates needed as well as the quantity of candidates that they need. Britain will once more be able to step into the ring of economic competitiveness and perhaps most importantly, people’s lives will begin to improve. We will return to a candidate led market. Which is exactly what we want.
Of course there is the new welfare to work scheme. But I’m not convinced by that. After all, do we get out of the economic morass by forcing skilled people into lesser job roles or do we seek to capitalise on their talents through tweaks to their skill sets. Tweaks that make them re-employable in today’s modified economy?
“There grows the stuff that won Waterloo”, said Wellington of Eton. I’m not convinced that this statement can mean all that much to the 2.5 million unemployed and the even larger numbers stuck in unrewarding and unsatisfying jobs in the UK. Our talent has much more to give. The sad thing is that the stuff that won Waterloo so far seems somewhat absent – in government employment policy at least.
So in a plea to our current leadership, a leadership who spoke of compassion at the dispatch box today, please understand that the majority of the unemployed do want to work but perhaps need just a little help. They don’t need brutality. They need that little bit of help and they need viable jobs. Brutality doesn’t create jobs.