News: Telephone and Writing Skills
Slough faces possible skills crisis
05 December 2007
A skills crisis could hit Slough, making in-house company training - such as telephone and writing skills training - ever more important.
A lack of qualified workers "threatens to hold back the town's booming economy", the Slough and Windsor Observer reports.
The town has twice as many businesses as the national average, meaning that vacancies are hard to fill. In fact, a quarter of the town's businesses list unfilled jobs, and many are taken by people from outside Slough itself.
One problem is that many potential candidates have inadequate English language skills - in fact, one employers said that 80 per cent of its applicants had poor English.
"Slough is a great place to do business but jobs and the skills needed in the town are changing and that is the risk that drew me to work with a team to put this conference on," said Slough MP Fiona MacTaggart.
"We need home-grown people to acquire skills as one in seven companies in the town have problems filling vacancies."
