By Nick Heath, 14 May 2008 10:56
NEWS
The UK will lose its base of highly skilled technology workers unless training and education is overhauled, industry leaders have warned.
It must tackle a slump in technology teaching and employer training to avoid being forced to buy in top level talent from China and India.
The warning comes in a report by technology trade association Intellect into the state of the technology industry in the UK.
Agenda Setters 2007
Find out who made this year's Agenda Setters list of the top technology movers and shakers.
The report says technology-related education is declining rapidly and that UK tech companies cannot recruit enough engineering, maths, science and technology graduates.
While the tech sector needs more than 140,000 new entrants every year the number of applicants for single subject computer courses has fallen from 31,000 in 2001 to 16,000 in 2006 said the report.
Intellect said getting more talented and skilled individuals into the workforce by developing better links with the educators and trainers of the workforce, was one of six key boosters needed to stimulate the industry.
Richard Holway, of Farnham Consulting, warned the lack of people to fill entry-level jobs in technology threatens employers' ability to train up the next generation of project managers on the job in the UK.
He said: "I am worried that unless we have these entry-level jobs in the UK the real skills in project management will disappear and we will have to buy that in from India or China."
John Higgins, director general of Intellect, said: "Every discussion we have with the members about what would help the sector focuses on the ability to get hold of the calibre of people they want.
"It is always the same issues, the availability of people with the right talents and targeted skills in sufficient numbers."
The report is based on a survey of Intellect's 100-strong leaders network.
It predicted growth in the technology industry at one to three per cent above UK GDP saying that a slowdown was expected in consumer electronics and telecoms but there was a more positive outlook in the electronics sector.
Other boosters needed identified in the report were getting higher professional standards in the sector; improved trust and confidence in the sector's ability to deliver value securely; better exploitation of innovation; an improved communications infrastructure; and improved relations with other sectors.
Comments
There are 11 comments. Join the discussion
1. Karen Challinor
an industry that dumps anyone over 40 on to the scrapheap as quickly as possible has no right to complain about skills shortages or lack of talented IT teaching staff
2. Roger Huffadine
Karen is correct - there are thousands of highly skilled IT people doing other jobs just because they know more than the people who are recruiting them.
When you look at what the government mandates as IT training in schools there is no wonder that we have a shortage of entry level candidates. The course content is puerile and superficial - furthermore we don't yet have typing on the National Curriculum,
reading = yes
writing = yes
maths = yes
typing = no
today we read from PCs
we use PCs for maths
we write on PCs
but nobody in government has worked out the productivity improvements and learning enhancements that come from teaching 9 & 10 year olds to type.
Technological age = my ar*e
3. Alexander Simpkin
My son wanted to do an IT A level but found it so badly taught, so unrelated to his experience and so uninspiring that he gave it up. Teenage courses should be built around the interests teenagers have and so be comprised of how to build a PC, familiarisation with all the different comms channels, software capabilities for the user and a touch of programming and language experience in Java & MS (despite language changing/developing so frequently). The trouble is, there is noone around to teach that breadth, so the only answer seems to be to educate through work study placements and/or apprenticeships. However, I don't envy the people who might be put in place to organise that effort, particularly those who have to link with the exam boards who appear to have absolutely no idea what they're doing whatsoever.
4. anonymous
Is this at all surprising given that IT or as the education sector insist on call it ICT has been a "Sink" subject in schools for the last few years with the best Schools not even carrying it as a GCSE option (Because of it's lack of value). A Level ICT is a joke, giving very little grounding in the subject at all, and an ICT degree from most Universities carrying less value to employers than Media Studies or Surfing .
The problem seems to be that most IT education seems to be "Training" on whatever product is flavour of the month when the syllabus is agreed, which means that by the time the Student takes the course the technology wave has passed them by, and because they have no general IT education these courses do not produce people who are IT Literate, but experts on using applications that are rapidly becoming out dated.
(The reason ICT is a Sink subject is that passing the exam is easy and the course counts as 4 GCSE’s in the league tables so Schools encourage there less bright pupils to take it to improve their ratings, the fact that employers and Universities do not count this exam as 4 GCSE’s is pretty irrelevant to Head Masters chasing a good league table position)
5. anonymous
When most of the creative starter jobs are done in India or China what's the incentive for talented people.
6. Mikal Dunne
As a freelancer/contractor I find it amazing employers expect those of us who fill in the specialist gaps within their organisation to work for peanuts. How on earth do they think we keep our skills and qualifications up to date? There is a large workforce out there more than capable of meeting business needs but business just won't pay a sensible rate to ensure the limited company freelancers remain capable of meeting market needs. They'd rather burn up new contractors/freelancers on pathetic rates who then cannot meet future demands for new contracts.
7. Rob H
"will lose" ?
"forced to" ?
where do these people live?
we have already lost a whole generation of engineers- even Bill Gates had to point that out.
Nobody forced the employers to go abroad, they chose to on the idea of shareholder value !!.
British employers treat IT staff like office furniture, like non value based commodities rather than assests. They deserve to go to the wall due to their gross imcompetence. IT education is in a bad state because the said people have tried to manipulated education / governments to suit their short term needs to avoid paying for training rather than the needed long term outlook.
to paraphrase Karen here, she is right about about the age issue, but its still about gender and other forms of stereotypes. Grace Hopper had to fight against the twin bias of age and gender and we are still dealing with it today. If you don't know who she was, then you have proven my point about IT education. time to outsource the senior management roles
8. anonymous
Why would anyone in this industry know who Grace Hopper is :-), it is a measure of what is wrong with IT that it does not matter. (Imagine doing Physics and not knowing who Newton, Kepler and Einstein were) I stopped looking at IT Graduates the day that when I asked one to explain virtual memory and they told me, after 4 years at University, that he did not know because he had only done software at university, not hardware!
Until we scrap all the IT courses currently in the education system and re-set everyone’s expectation on what we should expect from the various levels then we will carry on with this skills slump.
The only "Good" news is that with the recession starting to damage the city and R&D budgets some of the UK's mathematicians and physicists may once again look to the IT industry as a viable career.
9. Jim B
I just wanted to agree with one of the last comment's made, and add to it with a massive generalization.
Large companies in the UK now outsource much of their so called basic development work to countries where labour is cheaper, giving the contract to companies that provides services, rather than hiring individuals locally.
Faced with an environment where the companies that used to use local resources now buy in the cheapest from anywhere, its no wonder that technically able developers are having to leave this country to go to places where they are more protectionist about their IT skills pool (like say the US).
The skills "gap" is just a manifestation of this process of de-skilling of the workforce as a whole. The unsaid argument that large organisations use is why train people properly when you can buy it elsewhere cheaper.
Eventually, we'll (as a country) all wake up to realise we can't make anything ourselves anymore, but instead are staffed by "manager" who write logical system definitions, but cannot change a plug.
We are reaping what we've sown, and it may result in massive workforce de-skilling in what was one white collar work for graduates and professionals.
10. Jack Thompson
I would strongly advise anyone thinking of doing it against a career in IT in this country. Its not a job you can depend on for your career or livlihood.
11. Carl Christensen
this is the same BS we've hard in the US -- the simple answer, which is "horrifying" to the greedy CEO's, is just pay a little more. UK salaries for comparable jobs in the US are already very low, so if even these lower paid jobs are being sent to India, what kid in their right mind would go to school for this terrible career?
It's not about "not enough local talent" -- it's about corporations wanting to pay poverty-level wages for white-collar, high-education-required jobs!