What Skills Gap?
Unemployment is rising, heading for 2.5 million. Yet Monster claims to have ‘thousands of jobs’, with nearly 4,000 being posted yesterday alone. Really? What’s going on?
No doubt the dichotomy will be blamed on the ’skills gap’. Of the hundreds of thousands of people looking for work, so we are told, none have the skills for the jobs that are vacant. The official line is that we need more and better training, a revamped Learning and Skills Council, a Ministry for Skills and Education and so on. At Career Energy, we disagree.
The problem is not that we have a skills gap. The problem is that most people are in the wrong job. Look around you, how many people do you know who enjoy their work, who want to stay in their career, who believe that what they do allows them to play to their strengths? Not very many I’ll bet.
And what would happen if all these dissatisfied members of the work force made career changes, based on careful career planning, and got themselves into jobs that they valued, enjoyed and that allowed them to make the most of their talents? We’d have a happier more productive workforce, a better economy, the vacancies would be filled, the unemployment numbers would drop and the so-called skills gap would be plugged.
So what’s the answer? Better career planning. Apply some of the budgets currently allocated for training in the UK to top quality career planning. Help people to discover their options, allow them to make successful, strategic decisoons about their career. At Career Energy we know it works. It is time for a mind shift on the part of policy makers.
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Tags: Career Advice, career advisor, Career Change, Career Consultant, Career Energy, Career Planning, employment, jobs, learning and skills council, Long Term Unemployed, ministry for skills, skills, skills gap, unemployment
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