Great article about skills gaps and immigration

Really useful for proper context, plus some evaluation thrown in to boot:


Is migration the answer to the skills gap?

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The rules have been tightened for non-EU workers seeking employment in the UK

24 December 2015  

Sean Hargrave

It may be a political hot potato but could the answer to the UK’s skills gap come from bringing in recruits from overseas?


All employers know it can be difficult to find staff. Whether they are looking for highly or low-skilled employees, filling positions from the UK labour force is tough.


An easyJet survey of 1,000 companies found that the biggest issue facing companies with more than 20 employees is recruitment and retention.


Additionally, a recent global review of skills from the Hays recruitment company found, among EU countries, the UK had the fourth highest talent mismatch between skills required and available. Only Ireland, Spain and Portugal had higher mismatches.


Though it may be politically sensitive, the answer many are opting for is to bring in skills from abroad. This may prompt questions about whether this puts British workers at a disadvantage with jobs going to migrants who may push down wage levels.

But Chris Lawton, senior research fellow in economics at the Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, points to a Home Office and Department for Business, Innovation & Skills joint report on migration in March 2014. It found little evidence to suggest migration was negatively impacting British workers.


“The figures just don’t back up the perception some have that migration damages British workers in some way,” he says.


“Although you can never underestimate the social challenges of large changes in local population, you have to bear in mind that, economically speaking, the country has never employed more people; unemployment is at a pre-recession level of around 5pc at the same time as the latest Office for National Statistics figures show net migration is at a record high. So, employment’s high, vacancies are high and unemployment is low, despite record migration.”


Despite the generally positive outlook, he says the skills gap is a very big issue for employers, citing government figures that of the 740,000 vacancies the country currently has, around 146,000 roles are proving hard to fill because of a lack of suitably qualified or experienced candidates.


Despite this, there has been what Mr Lawton calls a disconnect between what the data shows and the migration policies pursued by the Home Secretary, Theresa May. Under the previous coalition and the current Conservative government she has tightened rules on non-EU workers entering the country and then being able to remain.

Difficulty finding talent

According to Jonathan Beech, managing director of Migrate UK, which helps companies bring in overseas talent, this is making it hard to bring in the skills many companies require. In particular, companies looking to fill roles that require qualified and experienced candidates in IT, science, engineering and manufacturing are struggling to bring in the right people within an acceptable time frame.


“There’s the misconception that people can just walk in and take British jobs and then stick around for as long as they want, but nothing could be further from the truth,” he says.


“We’ve seen successive amendments to immigration rules that are making it far tougher to bring people in. Companies would rather employ people locally but the skills just aren’t there a lot of the time.

Companies would rather employ people locally but the skills just aren’t there a lot of the time

“They have to prove this by advertising a position for 28 days and they can then apply for a licence to bring someone in from outside the EU who will not be allowed to stay beyond five years. This is now based on a quota system for a variety of skilled jobs, and it’s only very recently that one of these monthly quotas has been reached, and they were started in 2008.


“So the public perception is a million miles away from the reality, and tougher rules are simply placing unnecessary burdens on employers.”


The biggest issue for many British companies is that they risk losing out on top talent because the recruitment process can take several months, in which time it is likely that a candidate will have been attracted to another role outside the UK.

A numbers game

Rhys Morgan, director of engineering and education at the Royal Academy of Engineering, has noticed that since rules were tightened both qualified and student engineers are “voting with their feet” and choosing to study in the US and Canada where they are more likely to be allowed to look for a job once they have finished their studies.


He believes tighter work visa rules fly in the face of an inconvenient truth that the UK has to look beyond the EU to fill the vacancies for highly skilled work that increase in number every year as Britons retire.


“At the moment we can produce around half of the 100,000 engineers we need to find every year to fill vacancies and make up for those people who are leaving the industry,” he says. For the foreseeable future, the choice is unfilled vacancies or migration.

“That pales into insignificance when compared with the 500,000 engineers a year India is producing or the one million in China. We just can’t compete with those numbers, so it makes sense to let talented young people come here.”


For those involved in the industries that are calling out for more highly skilled candidates to fill vacancies, migration is not so much a political debate as a business requirement, he argues.


Even if schools began the necessary steps of producing suitably qualified young people today, the holy grail of more IT experts, manufacturing experts, scientists and doctors would still be more than a decade away. So for the foreseeable future, the choice is unfilled vacancies or migration.