A point of view
The gap is not a skills gap.
It is a gap in ownership. That distinction changes what you do about it.
Every few years someone announces that graduates are unemployable and institutions are out of touch. It is a comfortable story, because it assigns blame — and blame is cheaper than work.
The truth is duller. An institution is built to be stable: a syllabus approved this year will be taught for several more. An employer is built to move: the tools they hired for in January may be gone by December. Both are behaving correctly. The distance between them is structural, not a failure of will.
What is missing is ownership. A university has no mandate to track what an industry will need next quarter. An employer has no mandate to shape a curriculum they did not commission. So the distance holds, and the person standing in it is twenty-one, holding a degree, with no way in.
Closing it is not a matter of adding a module. It means putting a corporate and an institution in the same room with someone whose job is translation, because they do not share a vocabulary, a timescale, or a definition of success. It means designing a programme neither would have built alone, and then staying long enough to see it taught.
That is slow, unglamorous work with no obvious owner. We do it because the alternative is another cohort graduating into a market that was never told they were coming.
What that looks like in practice
A department designed from the first principle rather than bolted onto an existing faculty. A curriculum with an employer in the room while it is written, not consulted after. A placement pipeline that exists because two organisations agreed how it would work before the first cohort enrolled.