Migrant workers continue to plug skills gap

The survey, from the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development and KPMG, showed that across the whole economy, around one in five (19%) employers recruited migrant workers in the past three months, with public sector employers more likely to hire migrant workers than private sector employers. Employers are still reporting skills shortages with around two in five (41%) having vacancies they say are hard-to-fill. More than half of these vacancies are skills-related with engineer, doctor and nurse vacancies the most difficult to fill. One in 10 private sector organisations also plan to outsource jobs abroad in the next 12 months, with almost half (44%) of IT companies and almost one in five (17%) of manufacturing companies planning to outsource employment abroad. The most popular destination for outsourced jobs are India and Eastern Europe. Among employers planning to outsource jobs overseas, more than half (51%) plan to relocate UK jobs to India and more than a third (37%) plan to shift jobs to Eastern Europe. Gerwyn Davies (pictured), the report's author and public policy adviser at CIPD comments: "Despite rising unemployment, employers are still struggling to recruit the people they need and we are turning abroad to plug the gap. Through a combination of recruiting migrant workers to fill UK vacancies, or outsourcing work to locations abroad, employers are looking to strike the right balance between the skills for the job and the cost reductions needed to meet budget targets."