5 Par t 2: Employers’ views on employability skills?
35
On the topic of paying for qualifications and training for different groups, employers believed that the state and the individual bore the responsibility for funding people who were not their employees. However, employers were increasingly open to more responsibility in proportion to the relevance of the skills being developed. For developing employees, many employers preferred to take this responsibility, often shared with the individual, with a diminished role for the state. 5.3.2 Employers’ direct experience The previous six questions explored employers’ views in the abstract – what skills they would expect to see fully developed, what they believed that they should be responsible for funding, etc. The next series of questions aimed to understand how that had been experienced in practice when trying to recruit recent school or college leavers. All the survey respondents had indicated that they were either sometimes or frequently responsible for recruitment in their organisation. Q7 Have you been able to recruit school or college leavers with the right skills? The next survey question aimed to establish the proportion of those in the survey group who had tried to recruit a recent school or college leaver and of those, explore whether they had been able to recruit candidates with the right skills for their organisation. The survey asked: Have you been able to recruit school or college leavers that have the right skills for your organisation in the past 12 months? Precisely half the survey respondents had tried to recruit a recent school or college leaver in the last 12 months. As presented in Figure 9, of these, only 13.8% indicated that yes, they had always been able to recruit school or college leavers with the right skills for their organisation. Close to 50% said that they had sometimes been able to recruit, with 35.8% unable to recruit. Figure 9 Have you been able to recruit school or college leavers with the right skills? Yes, always 13.8% Don’t know 0.8% Yes, sometimes 49.6%
No 35.8%