Record numbers of employers plan to give jobs to workers from overseas despite the government’s immigration cap, new research has revealed.
One in four organisations plan to take on migrant staff in the next three months, says the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).
The number is the highest level the research has recorded and up from 22% in the last quarter.
A massive 60% of employers cite a lack of job-specific skills in the UK as the main reason for looking overseas for job candidates.
Employers are bypassing the government’s immigration cap and cutting costs by taking ready-qualified workers from the European Union rather than investing in up-skilling UK workers.
“The anomaly is we have persistently high unemployment, but the number of employers reporting recruitment difficulties remains high,” said a CIPD spokesman.
“This is because we have a highly skilled economy, with new skilled jobs coming on stream while low skilled jobs are decreasing or being farmed off to China and South Asia. The supply of highly skilled workers is simply not meeting the demand and we need overseas workers to fill the gap – in areas such as engineering, IT, and even in the public sector where we have a shortage of doctors and nurses and other key positions.”
Diversity leaders are presented with an extra challenge as job roles go through this transition.
Not only are the issues of current staff feeling disgruntled as they consider themselves overlooked for promotion and training still evident in the work force, but the problems are exacerbated by the arrival of better qualified and better paid individuals from overseas.
High unemployment is some of the more debt-ravaged Eurozone economies like Ireland, Spain, Italy and Greece are also adding more highly-skilled workers to the pool of available staff.
The result is 75% of employers are not looking to up-skill staff, 82% are not recruiting more UK graduates and 8% will offshore more jobs.
The government cap is aimed at pushing immigration under 100,000 a year.
This article is filed under :Immigration, Diversity, Legal, Leadership, Minorities, Role models
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