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Business Review 2006 from
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The skills gap
Tina Palmer
ASL Personnel Selection, director
in its crudest form, the relationship between recruitment agencies and their clients is one based on supply and demand.
Clients present agencies with vacancies and agencies supply a selection of appropriate candidates for each role.
Our relationship as a supplier places us in an interesting position. By observing recruitment trends we develop a unique insight into our clients' industry and how it is faring. An increase in vacancies tends to reflect business growth and, logically, a slowing in demand indicates the opposite.
As agencies we are inevitably affected by these recruitment trends, particularly in the financial sector. Over the past year we have seen a steady increase in the recruitment demands of the finance industry. This has come as a welcome change after three or four years of slowed demand.
This new recruitment drive has presented new challenges to the recruitment industry, in particular in addressing the developing skills gap between traditional trainee roles and current entry-level positions.
Traditionally, candidates have entered businesses with little or no experience and have started in back-office processing roles, where they have gained an insight into the industry and developed the skills required for promotion. But the past three or four years have seen a cut in trainee budgets, and back-office roles have become obsolete as they have been outsourced or automated. This has resulted in the development of a skills gap.
Entry-level positions now demand more from the candidates. They are entering businesses on what was traditionally the third or fourth rung of the ladder, and are required to correspond with clients and high-ranking colleagues much earlier in their career than ever before. Our clients in the finance industry are therefore demanding a higher calibre of candidate to enter their company, and this presents a challenge to recruitment agencies. We do not have the same pool of experienced trainees to place within these positions, and we are finding it increasingly difficult to assist our school-leavers who wish to enter the finance sector.
At ASL we have created a scheme which we hope will alleviate this situation and go some way to reducing the skills gap. We will soon be launching ASL's Launchpad Into Finance to help school leavers, on their way to university, prepare for entering a career in finance upon graduation from university.
Members of the scheme are placed within a relevant business, on a temporary basis during their university holidays. We hope that successful candidates will re-join the same business throughout their time at university, building a relationship with that client and gaining the skills they would otherwise only have gained in a full-time trainee role after they graduated.
The advantages for businesses are two-fold. Not only are they investing in the skills of their workforce of the future, they are also being given the opportunity to install their own business ethics onto the candidates they employ. The business and candidate will have time to ensure that they are well matched before a permanent position is offered. We foresee these benefits as being particularly beneficial to the trust and funds sectors where a long-term investment in training and experience are essential to progression.
Model
These temp-to-perm roles are becoming increasingly common, as is the use of temping experience to gain skills, but the Launchpad into Finance is the first initiative to package and focus this concept into a working model.
As each candidate is accepted on to the initiative, we will identify the skills areas to target for development. Each candidate will have a training strategy which we will follow and build upon, and the focus will be on strengthening skills when placing them with a client.
We have had an excellent response from sixth-form students to the Launchpad into Finance scheme, and our clients have been extremely positive too. We hope this will offer a solution to the expanding skills gap and encourage graduates to return to Jersey. Law firms offer bright school leavers similar bursary schemes; we hope that this initiative has equal success.
I think that in this year, and in coming years, Jersey will see the development of a more sophisticated model of recruitment. Vacancies will increase, along with an increased skills demand from the finance industry. In order to ensure that the recruitment and finance industries maintain a close working relationship, it is essential that communication channels remain open. Recruitment agencies must observe and respond to shifts in the finance sector. We must understand the demands of our clients in order to supply them with a top-class service.
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