Microsoft on Wednesday became the latest company to offer to help cut the UK’s rapidly lengthening dole queues by providing free IT skills training and persuading the thousands of small businesses it works with to employ jobseekers.

The commitment was made as unemployment in the UK climbed to 2.4m in August and is expected to keep on rising. A number of large companies, including Morrisons and Royal Mail, have vowed to help lower the total by providing training and apprenticeships.

Microsoft claims that the scheme could help as many as 500,000 people return to work, based on a three-year pilot programme it ran in the West Midlands, where it helped train 28,000 jobseekers. Of those, 10 per cent found work within three months and 40 per cent were employed within a year. Whether similar success rates will be seen in today’s more difficult economic climate, however, is unclear.

Microsoft will spend “tens of millions of pounds” on the programme. It will work with JobCentre Plus and the Work Foundation, led by Digby Jones, the former minister of state for trade and investment, as well as a number of charities.

“Around 77 per cent of jobs in the UK require IT skills but a lot of people don’t have that capability,” said Gordon Frazer, managing director of Microsoft UK. “One of the things we can do as an organisation is contribute to IT literacy and skills.”

Microsoft said it would help create 3,000 paid apprenticeship places by 2012, both in its own business and at the smaller IT companies it works with. Microsoft has a network of 32,000 partner companies – typically IT resellers and software developers – in the UK, which it says it will recruit into the scheme.

The company will provide 450,000 vouchers for training courses during the next three years, ranging from basic lessons in how to use a mouse and keyboard to technical skills such as configuring networks. Training will be online, at Microsoft’s IT academies, and through partners such as UK Online Cen­tres, the Wise Group and Leonard Cheshire Disability.

Microsoft itself has announced plans to shed 5,000 jobs across its global businesses by 2010. It runs programmes for IT skills and literacy in all the countries in which it operates.

Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, and Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, all welcomed the scheme.