EMPLOYERS in Scotland are paying a premium of £352 million a year to fill jobs as a result of a shortage of skilled workers.

According to research from the Open University, 86 per cent of Scottish organisations struggled to find workers with the right skills for the jobs they were advertising over the past 12 months.

Three in five senior business leaders said the issue was leading to recruitment processes taking longer than would previously have been the case.

To fill the gap employers are collectively spending an extra £352m a year on recruitment fees, inflated salaries, temporary staff, and training for workers hired at a lower level than intended.

Despite this, Marie Hendry of the Open University in Scotland said the money is being spent on “mitigating problems rather than solving them” by effectively “pushing the problem down the road”.

The research found that the skills shortage is not just impacting businesses financially, with two in five organisations saying they are not as agile as they need to be as a direct consequence of a lack of skills.

The issue is most acute at the senior end, with 70% of respondents saying that leadership or management roles were proving the hardest to fill.

Over half of senior leaders in Scotland (53%) expect the situation to deteriorate over the next 12 months, with 59% anticipating it will be harder to find staff with the right skills after the UK’s official departure from the EU following Brexit.

To try to address the gap, Ms Hendry said employers should consider using work-based learning and training, such as graduate apprenticeships, to help “upskill and reskill their staff”.

This would enable them to “grow their own talent and create more stable and sustainable workforces”, she added.

The survey was conducted in May this year, with 950 business leaders from across the UK taking part.