In the past two years respondents to surveys undertaken by the Chamber of Commerce and other business organisations advise that they are likely to be considering employing more workers in the near future but also that they expect to experience difficulties finding the right employee.
At the same time it would have escaped no one's notice that there are still portions of our population - often young people - who are not employed and not able to benefit from our improving economy.
Generally when these prospective employers are asked what they are looking for, their expectations are on the face of it quite realistic. They were also highlighted recently on social media by a tongue-in-cheek advertisement placed by a builder outlining what he wanted from prospective job applicants.
Apart from these characteristics, another impediment is lack of job experience and this is obviously harder to tackle. Without work you cannot get job experience, and without job experience you cannot get work.
I imagine the importance of job experience is not so much to demonstrate skills directly associated with the prospective employment but to provide evidence of the other characteristics that are commonly seen as important to all employees.