Last month saw the release of our latest Quarterly Economic Survey which gives a great insight into how business across south east Wales are performing, their plans for the coming months and what challenges they are currently facing.

It is clear that economic confidence is on the up, both from out latest QES results and also from the latest GDP statistics, and businesses are looking to capitalise on this.

However, the fact remains that many are facing difficulties recruiting.

Indeed, 50 per cent of businesses in the Newport area tried to recruit during the previous quarter, yet 50 per cent reported a frustration in finding the right people to fill vacancies. It is often said that this is in the ICT, engineering and electronics industries, but we are hearing increasing shortages of skilled manual labour workers too.

Politicians and business leaders have long spoken about the skills gap.

I can remember as far back as the 1997 General Election where Tony Blair’s mantra was ‘education, education, education’, yet, 20 years on, we still face the same challenge of bridging this gap.

Ensuring that people are ready for the world of work is absolutely vital and a more joined up approach to this is long overdue.

The private, public and education sectors need to work together to make sure schools, colleges and universities are equipping people with the skills that make them ready for employment as soon as they have finished in education.

We need entrepreneurship, finance, presentation skills, and even sales and marketing, to be woven in to the school curriculum.

However this does not just relate to school and university leavers.

There needs to be support to facilitate, and, where possible, subsidise skills programmes for those who are already in work or who are actively seeking employment to ensure people are able to continually develop or have the best possible chance to be the ‘right people’ for all the businesses trying to recruit.

Economic confidence is up, business are looking to grow their workforce and we have a real opportunity to give people the skills that can really add value to these businesses, helping to secure long-term jobs and enabling the economy to continue to flourish.

Let’s hope that someone isn’t writing a column like this in another 20 years or so, talking about the opportunities our generation missed to have really addressed this issue.