Universities need to do more to teach undergraduates basic people and communication skills, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) has said this week.

Figures showing that 10.1 million graduates were fighting over 9 million graduate-level jobs in 2008 prompted the CBI's creation of a Higher Education Taskforce to ensure that universities are training undergraduates appropriately for entry into employment.

The taskforce, chaired by Sam Laidlaw, chief executive of Centrica, and including influential employers as well as university vice-chancellors, will develop ideas to integrate higher eduction with employment needs in the hope of influencing future government policy.

Speaking in praise of Liverpool John Moores University's decision to add a "World of Work" module to all of its courses, Richard Lambert, Director-General of the CBI said: “We think that soft skills are an important part of education, not necessarily for everybody, but most people need to be able to get up in the morning.”

However, Rick Trainor, president of Universities UK, told The Times this week that most employers were not dissatisfied with the quality of graduates, saying: “I don’t see a fundamental conflict between pursuing subjects of study rigorously and helping to prepare people for employment.”

Displaying findings that the UK lags behind countries such as Portugal, Australia, Greece and Poland in its spending on higher education, Lambert argued that Britain should increase the proportion of GDP that it spends in this sector but refused to indicate whether or not this should include a rise in tuition fees.

Susan Anderson, head of education at the CBI, said: "There are skills we expect every graduate to have but there are problems there."

She said that employers, too, have to do their part by providing internships to give students high quality work experience and aid their passage into employment.