By Natasha Lomas, 23 June 2008 15:46
NEWS
If IT is to plug its skills gap by attracting graduates from other disciplines the industry needs to convince students the work can be as exciting as its potentially wallet-fattening pay packets.
Research released today by a career development charity CRAC has found students' main reason for avoiding going into IT is a perception the work will be dull, dull, dull.
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More than 60 per cent of non-computing students cited "boring work" as the primary reason they would avoid joining the sector. Yet the vast majority of the nearly 2,000 students surveyed believe IT offers good career prospects and highly paid jobs. This is good news as it means students can be won over, according to the charity.
CRAC development director Robin Mellors-Bourne said employers should be able to counter negative perception about tech work as other views held about the sector are good.
He said in a statement: "We found that very few of the students hold negative perceptions about the IT profession or its people."
The research, entitled Do undergraduates want a career in IT?, found work experience remains the strongest influence on career choice for students, with existing schemes being very successful in portraying IT work in a good light, according to the charity.
It also found less than 10 per cent of respondents believe the benefits of an IT career were communicated to them at school.
Industry sector skills council, e-skills UK, and a leading UK academic recently criticised the teaching of IT in secondary schools and called for a radical overhauling of the curriculum, warning kids are being put off tech in droves by tedious lessons in Word and Excel.
Mike Rodd, director of industry body the British Computer Society (BCS) Learned Society, which is driving an outreach campaign to schools to improve IT's image, said in a statement: "Greater exposure of young people to the merits of a job in the IT sector is vital, we need to show them the variety of roles in IT and the importance that IT carries today. IT is at the heart of business these days and there are real opportunities now to have a career in IT which will ultimately lead to a position on the board."
Rodd added that studying a computing or ICT A-Level at school has "a surprisingly big impact" on whether a student ultimately chooses an IT career, regardless of what degree they study.
The CRAC research also found a gender divide in students' response to IT which suggests the industry will have to work harder to win over female undergraduates who are not studying computing.
Mellors-Bourne explained: "While female computing students were every bit as keen as their male counterparts to work in the sector, this was not the case for [female] students in other disciplines. The survey suggests that many women will be attracted by the impact that IT projects have in other sectors and areas of life, while the men tend to like the technical projects."
He added: "If the UK IT sector wants to remain competitive it needs to harness the best talent. It is already doing a lot right but we have identified a few key areas in which some decisive change could be really effective."
Comments
There are 6 comments. Join the discussion
1. Karen Challinor
well yeah
the perception of the majority of IT work is this
you use packages developed by someone else to do work for someone who doesn't understand the package and you catch all the flak when something goes wrong, in other words you are someones dogsbody
or
you work in a call centre working from a script someone else developed, you are everyones dogsbody
or
you work in an IT centre for non it literate managers who want quick fixes rather than solutions to problems because they (the managers) stupidly agreed an SLA with 100% uptime on the servers without providing any spare capacity so you can do maintenance or backups, so when something goes wrong you work through a pre prepared script which starts "reboot the server" and again you catch all the flak when something goes wrong.
so in a nutshell IT is perceived as a go nowhere, achieve nothing, earn peanuts job with long hours and no challenges other than finding the willpower to drag your protesting frame back to work for yet more abuse from people who know nothing about IT before tbeing tossed onto the scrapheap at 40-45 unless you make it into management
lets face it I don't want a career in IT these days so why should anyone else
2. Don Tregartha
That's because it is DULL
certainly the ICT classes my kids endure are. Learning microsoft office apps by rote.... YAWN.
Kids don't need to be taught that stuff. Both mine picked up photoshop and toon boom studio without any assistance from me.
What they should learn is how to create apps. I said CREATE. Maybe it'll be slow, but once they get beyond the "Hello world" stage, the bug will bite big style.
3. Haydn Rees
Students, who don't realise how boring and dirty the non- "Knowledge Economy" can be may think IT is boring. I did a 1st degree in English & History, and spent 2 years doing clerical work.
When I got ESF funding to do an MSc Computer Science, (one of the ones designed to recycle non-IT graduates into IT), every single person on the course had astronomically high morale, and a sense of being saved from really boring work by a career in IT.
Maybe someone needs to back up the Herse, and let these students smell the flowers.
4. Richard Sarson
All together now. A lot of people have got to rethink their lives:
1. the schools have to get away from word and Excel.
2. The Universities have to rethink their curricula. And market 'creative technology' - not 'computer science' - courses passionately.
3. The IT industry has to revamp its geeky, buggy image.
Then, IT might regain its 1960's glamour for the young.
5. Sam
Students are researching careers and are finding out from people that they know in the industry the truth about this field. They are also hearing from students about to graduate about how rare actual job offers are.
With the current trend of constant cost
cutting, downsourcing and offshoring of anything IT related, as a potential
student looking at careers, why would anyone want to go into IT? Other careers
are more stable, with a higher likelyhood of making it to retirement. There are
too many actual examples of I.T. workers having their jobs churned. Upon finding
another job, they find that the pay offered is below a "living wage". For the older
worker, they eventually find out that they are "too old", if they get any response at all.
6. James Bloor
It may be dull work, but the truth is that IT no longer offers "wallet-fattening" salaries (if it ever did, for the great majority of IT workers). IT being well-paid is largely a myth. Wages for IT jobs have hardly gone up at all over the last 10 years, meanwhile the employers are offshoring every job to India that they possibly can. The wages are crap: 22K for JAVA/C++ programming? You'd be better off being a plumber or electrician, and less likely to have your job moved offshore and dumped on the dole. Why sweat yourself for years getting a degree when the wages you earn at the end of it are so poor and youve got no job security becuase of the offshoring to India?