The latest employment statistics released by the ONS last week should bring a crumb of comfort to Britain’s younger generation.

895,000 young people were registered as unemployed between February and April this year, the lowest number since April 2009. Unemployment across all age groups also dropped to 2.43 million.

Kevin Green, the chief executive of the REC, said the reduction will be welcomed but warned that this could be the calm before the storm. Ten of thousands of young people will be leaving full-time education in the next few months and a large proportion of them will not have a job waiting for them.

The picture looks mixed for those in the 50-64 age bracket. 36,000 more people in this age group joined the working populous but the number claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance also increased and this group also has the highest proportion of people who are long-term unemployed; i.e. without a job for more than 12 months.

Meanwhile, prospects are improving in the City. The MD of Marks Sattin, Dave Way, said there has been a visible boost in middle tier employment amongst the 35 – 49 age group in City firms and finance and accountancy workers are confident they will receive a salary increase in excess of 8% this year.

The director for employment at the CBI, Neil Carberry, said the private sector seems to be creating jobs and he hopes this trend will continue. However, long-term unemployment is still a serious problem and the government must tackle the structural causes of this in order to get the UK working.

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Employers may not be too pleased to learn that 14 million working hours per week are currently being lost due to employees and contractors looking for other jobs whilst at work.

Monster recently surveyed more than 2,000 jobseekers, all of whom currently have a job, and discovered that 28% of them spend more than three hours of working time every week looking for another position. 16% spend more than five hours and 7% spend in excess of ten hours a week job hunting.

If these figures were indicative of the UK workforce as a whole, employers would be losing more than £250 million each week due to these job hunting activities.

Employees and contractors are not only surfing the net looking for jobs. 60% admit to doing online job searches, but 50% also update their CV at work, 49% actually apply for new positions and nearly 25% conduct telephone interviews from office phones.

However, 40% of employees think their boss knows what they’re doing and 12% have been caught, either by their boss or one of their colleagues. 2% of the survey’s respondents had been fired for their job hunting at work activities.

Doctor’s appointments are the most common excuse used when it comes to attending interviews. Strangely enough sickness and domestic emergencies come lower down the excuse list than pet emergencies and needing to be at home to receive a delivery.

Monster spokeswoman, Isabelle Ratinaud, said that job hunting is time consuming and the survey’s results show just how desperate some people are to move. However, although it may be tempting to job hunt during your employer’s time, this could affect references and result in disciplinary action and dismissal.

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We keep hearing about the skills shortage in IT in this country. A lot of the justification for work being outsourced and offshored, for example, is justified on the grounds that the clients can’t find the people they need in the UK, so simply have to go elsewhere for them. And as I predicted some time ago, the level of work being offshored is creeping up, not only in numbers of jobs but in the seniority as well. Helpdesks have long gone, as have standard coding roles. Now we’re seeing DBA, BA and PM work going the same way.

So why are one in six of our UK resident IT graduates out of work then? I think there may be two things at work here (unlike those graduates…)

Firstly the reason is not a lack of skills; it’s a lack of money. And, to a lesser extent, a lack of vision.

We cannot possibly have that many qualified people out of work because they can’t do the job. Also, of course, the public sector has been shedding staff at an ever-increasing rate, so the pool of experienced people is steadily growing. Finally there is a still a high number of experienced freelance IT people out there who haven’t worked for many months.

As always, the client is looking to take money off the bottom line. Outsourcing is a very good way to do this, so having made the decision to outsource a key business function – in itself a dubious and very short-term move, may I add – they look for the cheapest option. That will not be the UK-based workforce who, oddly enough, prefers to charge a living wage for their work, but an offshore operation with a much lower labour rate. QED.

Except they aren’t actually cheaper, when measured over a year or two. OK, I speak only from personal experience and some apocryphal tales from co-workers, but the story is quite consistent. Firstly what you get is not what you wanted, at least not the first time round. A huge amount has to go back to be re-worked. Plus there is often a habit of not correcting the faulty code, but re-writing it. It may be more accurate but it is also a lot slower. Then, when it does work, trivia like in-line comments, error-handling and security controls are often below par, so if a problem does occur the recovery is more complex than you may realise..

So by the time you get a robust working product you have spent a large chunk of the money you were hoping to save. This is a bit of a shame. I mean, it’s almost like the business driver for the outsourcing company is to maximise their revenue, not service the client’s requirements. Surely not.

The other reason is the one I mentioned last week. If you only look inside your own industry for staff, regardless of how relevant that industry experience is to the job in hand, then obviously you will be looking at a much smaller pool of candidates. Even within apparent monoliths such as banking, you get the same apartheid; you may have five years in Investment Banking but we deal with Derivatives so sorry, you’re simply not qualified.

So combine the two and the much heralded but completely mythical UK Skills Shortage is actually a self-inflicted wound. And not only self-inflicted but self-perpetuating, since we don’t have the people coming in at the bottom to fill these roles who, in five to ten years, would be the ones in the middle management positions making it work. Damn, we’ll have to outsource them as well…

So clearly there is a skills shortage. Sadly it lies not with the workers, but with the management.

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The government has promised to help 40,000 new businesses start up during the course of the next 3 years.

Last week, David Cameron announced that the government run Business Link service is to be overhauled in order to provide more support to British entrepreneurs, a move that could also benefit accountants for contractors.

The Government currently provides various online resources to support businesses but there have been complaints that it’s time consuming to trawl through different websites looking for information. 170 publicly-funded websites will now be condensed into a single Government business resource site.

The new Business Link website will allow companies to register online, sort out their tax affairs through the business tax dashboard, search for public sector contracts and find information on legislation and training.

The news came as the coalition looks for additional ways to stimulate job creation and boost economic growth.

The Prime Minister said that during 2011 and beyond, the government will focus on driving job creation and supporting growth. In order to transform the economy and create many thousands of new job opportunities, the government must help new firms start up and SMEs grow.

The government also intends to offer grants and loans, under the New Enterprise Allowance scheme, to help 20,000 unemployed people start their own business if they can demonstrate a robust business plan. Back in October, the coalition said it would offer this help to 10,000 individuals but it has now doubled the figure.

Under the scheme, people wanting to become self-employed will receive £1,725 in allowances over a six month period. They will also be paired with a volunteer mentor who will examine their business plan and if it is robust, the individual will receive a loan from Jobcentre Plus, up to a total of £1,000, to cover business start up costs.

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Another frustrating week in the hunt for the next contract. It’s clear that there is still a fair bit of work out there for the taking. Sadly it’s also clear that there are an awful lot of people out there trying to take it and competition is very strong. But it seems to have had at least one side-effect; you must only apply for a job if that’s the job you’re already doing.

You can accept that if the role is in say Finance, then clearly you do save a lot of issues taking on someone who already works in Finance, since they would know the regulatory and business environment. Actually it turns out an awful lot of openings are in Finance since the only people with the money to spend are the banks. Wonder where they got it all…

Anyway, I digress. Taking someone already in an industry vertical, while frustrating to the outsiders looking in, is quite understandable. However, the market now sees to be taking this to a whole new level which is what causes the frustration: no matter how good you are at what you do, if someone doesn’t want you to do exactly the same thing for them that you’re doing now, then you have a problem.

I’ve talked before about the whole agency candidate-finding process being reduced to a box-ticking exercise in an attempt to get the flood of applications down to manageable levels. This also saves them a lot of money themselves of course, since the bulk of the work can be delegated to fairly junior researchers who don’t actually need to understand the role or the candidates.

So getting a role is now totally dependent on what it says on the CV. And that is where it all starts to go a bit wrong.

If your CV is to stand a chance it has to be a very close match to the original requirement. Sadly, however, with the laziness of the average agent, a lot of the job specification doesn’t make it to the advert; probably takes too long to cut-and-paste it in to Broadbean or whatever they use to set the adverts up. Given a career history like mine that is pretty wide ranging, I then have to work out which bits to highlight in the first page summary on my CV – no agent bothers to read the detailed job history any more – to stand even a vague chance of getting past the first filtering process at the agency, never mind getting passed on to the client. And if the advert misses a key bit of information, then you fail at the first hurdle.

As an example, I put an application in yesterday evening and around midday today I finally got to talk to the agent about the role. Too late! It seems the role was largely about recovering a programme of work that was not delivering and needed a total shake up. “But you didn’t ask for that, and as it happens that’s what three of my last four roles were mostly all about, fixing and successfully delivering broken projects” I pointed out. One of which, incidentally, was worth around £250 million.

“Ah but”, was the reply, “You didn’t state that explicitly so I didn’t pick it up. Sorry, but I’ve already sent in all the CVs I’m allowed to”. End of conversation.

So there in a nutshell is why good people are sat on the bench. This whole market needs a different approach. And that’s something I will talk about next week.

Meanwhile, anyone need an expert is anything?

Alan Watts can found at LinkedIn.
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