Broadening access to skills to compete in the war for talent

An interesting article in Personnel Today released this week about the War for Talent which highlights some of the specific challenges related to this in the public sector.

Like most areas of the workforce, candidate shortages in key areas such as Technology and Digital remain in the public sector. When you add tight budgets and low percentage pay-rises into the mix it is no surprise that this is having a significant impact in both attraction and retention of the workforce.

As the war for talent continues to heat up it’s imperative that the public sector broadens their access to skills. Public Sector Resourcing (PSR) recently launched Recruit, Train, Deploy (RTD) which enables our customers to access diverse talent from a variety of backgrounds and skill-sets. Candidates receive paid training or a bursary across in-demand areas and are assigned to work on live projects with our Government customers.

RTD might not be the silver bullet that solves all talent attraction challenges, but we see this as a mid to long term solution for teams to create and build the skills they need rather than buy them in an increasingly constrained, high-cost market.

But one of the biggest benefits of this model is that it supports social mobility by increasing opportunities for candidates where there perhaps was none. A win win if ever there was one.