Matching records - need help

Hi Guys I am in the process of upgrading an access db to Visual Basic. My problem is this - I have to automatically match Vacancy Skills Requirements with the candidates who have the appropriate skills.
The Access DB table tblVacancies contains vacancy info but the
skills required for a vacancy are saved to a table which will
contain the VacancyiD and the Expertise Code

The problem I have is that in the table containing Contractor information, the expertise field has the data in text format

How do i go about matching this?

Thanks for your help

Just to do a bit fo explaining

We have three tables
TblVacancies
tblContractors
tblExpertise - this contains the expertise and a related ID
tblExpertiseRequirements will contain records with the VacancyID and the code relating to the expertise selected

The tblContractors expertise field may contain more than one expertise item, example, cataloguing,inventory control