Recruitment and Retention
One of the key themes of both the Local Government Pay and Workforce Strategy and the Children’s Workforce strategy is resourcing, recruitment and retention, thus ensuring that local authorities recruit, train and retain the staff they need to deliver high quality services to their communities.
The reason that it is important is that In March 1995, 30% of local authorities reported they were experiencing some recruitment and retention difficulties. By January 2004, this had increased to 94% of authorities saying they have difficulties recruiting to specific posts. Almost all the key shortages are in areas where local government is the primary employer. Additionally, the local government workforce is older than the wider economy, with nearly two-thirds of the workforce aged 40 and over. 31% of the local government workforce is 50 or over and hence due to retire over the next 15 years.
Click the link below for skill shortages currently facing local government.
Current Skill Shortages
Local government needs a supply of high quality staff to cope with the demand for changing, high quality services. To address this it needs to use workforce planning and effective people management techniques to harmonise the supply of high quality staff with the demand for changing, higher quality services. There is also continuing need to analyse workforce issues and to set this analysis against the best predictions for future service demand.
Details of what North West Employers is doing to help the situation can be found by clicking Recruitment and Retention Initiatives in the navigation pane on the left.