Sussex companies need to move quickly to secure the best staff, according to a number of the county's technology companies.

Mike Herd, executive director of the Sussex Innovation Centre (Sinc), said: "After September 11, the whole technology and new media cluster experienced a fall in demand for their services but in recent weeks things have started to pick up again.

"This return to normality will create the same skills shortages experienced last year, so Sussex employers need to consider recruiting earlier rather than later to ensure consistent business growth."

The centre is a third of the way through its Phase 2 extension programme, which will more than double its capacity to 40,000sqft and enable it to accommodate more than 50 companies, compared to about 30 at present.

The expansion, which is due to be completed in November is expected to create about 150 new jobs.

Mr Herd said one of the main problems for employers was finding skilled staff and companies were having to move quickly to secure the best people.

He said: "Brighton and Hove currently has a small pool of additional skilled labour because recent graduates from both universities, attract-ed by the city's abundance of leisure and pleasure facilities, have chosen to stay in the area.

"These people will soon be swallowed up by the demand for high-calibre staff."

"We have a number of companies at Sinc that have recognised the impending shortages and are employing high-level staff as soon as they find them."

Niall McCrae, managing director of Brighton-based Sigmer Technolgies, said: "We have noticed many of our neighbouring companies are now recruiting heavily. We anticipate problems finding enough skilled staff to meet our requirements over the coming months so we're snapping up talented people now to make sure we meet our targets."

Mark Robinson, managing director of Exam On Demand, said: "We have one member of staff joining us next week but it was hard work to find a person of the right calibre."

Efforts are been made to improve training and remedy the skills shortfall by organisations such as SkillsTrain, the SouthEast media training consortium, which launched a programme of subsidised consultancy, training and development for both old and new media. But in the short-term, recruitment problems remain.

Trisha Boland, director of SkillsTrain, said: "We are based at Sinc and see first hand the difficulty many local companies experience recruiting the right staff.

"There is an increasing skills shortage in the South-East, caused by a recent upsurge in the jobs market. This is very positive for the local industry but it means finding sufficiently trained and skilled staff is becoming increasingly hard."

Sussex Enterprise estimated difficulty recruiting staff was a constraint on the ability of 20,000, or 35 per cent, of the county's businesses.

It had hit 40 per cent of the most dynamic businesses, many in the technology and new media sectors.

Economic researcher Joe Clease said: "If businesses cannot find skilled staff, they cannot grow as fast as they would otherwise like and then the economy hits the buffers."

www.sinc.co.uk
www.sigmer.com
www.examondemand.co.uk
www.mediabusiness.net