Leader: Who shares wins in skilled staff stakes

The present skills shortage is not just a matter of the year 2000 fiasco propelling Cobal programmers into day rates of #1,000-plus. It is an accumulated failure of UK companies to look ahead and build the necessary infrastructures to recruit and retain staff. Many years ago I laboured in the Civil Service. In those heady days of full employment, recruiting staff in the regions was relatively easy in an era where school leavers were looking to the large Civil Service establishments such as the Driver & Vehicle Licensing Centre in Swansea, as their parents had once looked to the shipyards and mines for jobs.

But as the economy boomed, the Civil Service realised that it had to retain its staff as well, and embarked on ambitious and long-term plans to keep its newly trained staff. In departments such as the Department of Health & Social Security (as it was then known) it could take up to a year to train a clerical officer. The last thing you needed was staff churn, so the phrase, ?recruit and retain? was drummed into the heads of managers at all levels.

But how many IT companies have strategies to keep staff? And how is it the industry has managed to make the same mistakes that it made during the last recession. During recessions, companies tend to freeze training and recruitment. But that just walls up a large section of staff who suddenly become mobile and burst out of any organisation which does not give them a clear career structure when the economy is on the rise again.

And the marketing spend is the first line of the budget to get the chop from corporate bean counters whose main aim in life is to safeguard their careers and the short-term bottom line. But ironically, as the last slump showed, that is just the time to keep on spending. That?s the lesson the advertising industry learned in the early 70s.

Now is the time to borrow some examples from our American friends. Do we really think that staff will stay if they don?t have a stake in a successful company? How many UK companies can say they are sharing their success with their staff? Companies are finding that they have to offer incentives to key staff, which amount to more than just annual bonuses. Share option schemes and a host of almost monthly initiatives have now to be deployed to keep staff. And we shouldn?t be surprised. Loyalty, after all, is a two-way process.