Last week, the heads of the CBI and the British Chamber of
Commerce, together with the European IT Commissioner warned of the
competitive threat from IT skills shortages.
John RileyGroundswell
The Government is worried and is finalising a three-year
strategy plan to address e-skills. But alongside this action sits
deep frustration.
Employers do not invest sufficiently in IT training or
retraining, employees cannot afford it and government screws up.
Green cards for foreigners is a short- term cop-out, as is the
receding propensity to pay fortunes from variable cost budgets to
IT contractors. The latency in the workforce is ignored.
There is no IT resourcing crisis: we have a re-use one. We need
to retrain older staff and encourage women returners. IT needs
bright people who take an interest in business and its impact, not
techno geeks. So training has to encompass business issues too.
We also need an aggressive strategy to train and encourage
end-users to do maintenance for themselves. So industry and
government must develop mechanisms for cross disciplinary funding
to generate the integrated skills required. If they do not, IT
skills will remain an insoluble IT problem, not the soluble
business challenge it really is.
john.riley@rbi.co.uk
The training debate