IT training could be a way back to employment

19:30 23rd January 2009

Unemployment levels in the UK have crept towards the two million mark and are now at their highest since 1997.

Mass job cuts in manufacturing and retail have left 6.1 per cent of the UK's workforce out of a job.

Trades Union Congress (TUC) general secretary Brendan Barber painted a pessimistic picture of the jobs market.

"There is no disguising how bad today's employment figures are," he said.

"Compared with last month's figures unemployment is up, employment is down, the number of redundancies is up and the number of job vacancies is down."

While the figures may seem bad, they don't represent the full scale of the problem as the data does not include the tens of thousands of jobs lost over Christmas at places such as Woolworths and financial institutions.

With so many people searching for a job, those who make the extra effort to re-train could have an added advantage.

The modern world means that IT training can be invaluable as almost every UK business relies of technology to run.

With Lloyds TSB taking over HBOS recently, trade union leaders urged the government to help safeguard jobs at the newly amalgamated banking firm.