RE: At a guess there may well be a “skills gap”, but not as it would have been seen in the past -in the past such positions may have been filled from an applicant pool no better than the current one. Employers today however are less willing to take a chance, and the “openings” are far more conditional than before.
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Speaking for the IT industry, You should see the list of skills/experience that many companies require from candidates. Aside from programming experience in multiple programming languages ( all of them have to be CURRENT ), they require you to be familiar with industry specific standards, they all require you specifically to have experience in this particular industry that they are in.
Not only that, they also require that you be familiar with some exotic software tool or package that their company bought from a vendor.
I have been in the IT industry for over 20 years and when I read some of the job specs posted out there... I begin to ask myself if I can even be offered a job given that I only meet some of the requirements that demand.
I have seen these.
They are meant for only one purpose - to hire a specific individual while complying with whatever internal HR rule or management whim about “posting” a job.