3.17 The Department is aware that it has skills gaps in its civilian workforce but finds it difficult to quantify exactly what skills and where, owing to poor information available. To address this shortfall, the Department has undertaken some analysis on the six business-critical areas identified above. This analysis has shown that 16 per cent of civilian posts in these critical areas are vacant.14
3.18 The Department cannot forecast likely future skills gaps as it has no civilian workforce planning model; although this is common in the Civil Service. It recognises that this is a deficiency and is developing a civilian workforce planning model along similar lines to the military.
3.19 The Department's ability to address some of these skills gaps is currently constrained by a civil service-wide recruitment freeze. Limited numbers of new posts that were approved between January and March 2011 were in the following areas:
• Twenty-eight per cent support to operations.
• Twenty-seven per cent business resilience-Health and Safety.
• Seventeen per cent Defence Acquisition Reform Programme.
• Twenty-eight per cent for other business-critical posts.
3.20 The military has two types of skills gaps:
• Operational pinch-point trades, where existing skills gaps are affecting operational output.
• Manning pinch-point trades, where skills gaps could potentially affect future operations if action is not taken now.
3.21 Pinch points can occur for a variety of reasons: failure to recruit; poor retention; umber and frequency of operations; or shortfalls in skills sets. The military currently has 0 pinch-point trades across all three Services, such as helicopter pilots, and pharmacists. The Department tries to manage these gaps by, for example, allowing non-operational posts to become vacant; requiring personnel to break harmony guidelines;15 using less or more experienced personnel; and financial incentives. To increase personnel in specific trades, the Department can increase training capacity, amend training courses, change the trade structure and offer financial incentives. To understand how the Royal Navy has managed the skills shortages in submariners see Figure 9.
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14 This includes posts which have been vacant for more than six months.
15 Harmony sets the frequency with which military personnel should be deployed on operations with the aim of striking a balance between deploying people on operations, training and spending time with their families, which varies by service.