Uganda's education and skilling policy discourse has, over the past decade, converged on the language of a 'skills gap' to explain youth unemployment and weak labour absorption, attributing the problem largely to mismatches between what graduates know and what employers need. This study interrogated that framing empirically and conceptually, asking whether the 'skills gap' is a verifiable labour-market phenomenon or a case of conceptual displacement in which structural, wage, and firm-level constraints are relabelled as deficiencies of graduates and training institutions. Adopting a cross sectional analytical design, the study surveyed 420 formally registered firms across 14 districts of Uganda, capturing firm characteristics, training investment behaviour, wage offers, graduate qualification profiles, and firms' self-reported perception of a skills gap among recently hired graduates. Data were analysed using univariate description, bivariate chi-square and t-test comparisons, and a multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression with firms nested within districts to account for geographic clustering and unobserved district-level heterogeneity. Overall, 60.2% of firms reported a skills gap among recent graduate hires. Bivariate analysis showed that firm size, training investment, and qualification mismatch were significantly associated with reporting a skills gap (p