The UK's economy could be damaged within a decade unless
employers and educators act now to create a new breed of IT
professionals, warns E-Skills/Gartner study.
Businesses in the UK are facing a shortage of skilled IT
professionals which could damage the UK's competitiveness within a
decade.
That was the warning from an in-depth study by public-private
sector training partnership E-Skills UK and analyst firm Gartner,
which was released last week.
The study, based on interviews with more than 3,200 employers,
found that, with the recovery in the jobs market in its infancy,
employers are already finding it difficult to fill vacancies.
More than 33% of companies with job vacancies for IT professionals
claimed to have had difficulty filling them, the research revealed.
Of these, 76% said they had been forced to delay the development of
new products and services. More than 42% had seen increases in
operating costs and 20% had lost business to competitors.
However, these short-term problems mask a longer term imbalance in
the supply and training of IT professionals which is threatening to
damage the international competitiveness of the UK, the study
concluded.
Over the next decade, businesses in the UK will need between
156,000 and 197,000 new entrants into the IT profession each
year.
Universities are producing only 8,300 IT graduates a year, leaving
a gap that will need to be filled by drawing in hundreds of
thousands of staff from other professions and academic
disciplines.
There are few signs that employers, universities and the further
education system are prepared to meet this challenge. The study
argued for an "ambitious, coherent IT skills strategy" that would
see employers working much more closely with universities and
government to meet the demand.
"The UK is already lagging behind other countries in IT uptake,"
said Margaret Sambell of E-Skills UK. Employers are telling us that
there are 1.4 million users of IT who need to radically upgrade
their skills over the next three years. And there is a workforce of
1.2 million whose skills need to keep up with changing technology
and business. This up-skilling is not going to happen if we use our
current models."
All of this may sound familiar to IT professionals who read the
Stevens Report on the IT profession in 2000. That report, the most
comprehensive analysis of the state of the IT profession then
conducted, reached similar conclusions.
But its publication, just before the biggest downturn in IT for a
decade, meant that the widespread support it had generated from
employers and government vanished under the onslaught of heavy
redundancies and downsizing.
Four years on, with the IT jobs market on the verge of a new
recovery, the underlying problems identified by the Stevens Report,
far from going away, have assumed a new urgency.
It has become increasingly clear that the growth of offshore
outsourcing and the trend for businesses to demand off-the-shelf
rather than bespoke software will radically change the nature of
the IT profession.
There will be growing demand for IT professionals with the ability
to integrate pre-packaged components into complete systems. These
services will increasingly be provided by multiple suppliers and
will often stretch across a number of departments within a
business, demanding greater management skills.
The distinction between IT professionals and general business
managers will blur and disappear, the E-Skills study predicted. IT
professionals will need to understand more about the needs of the
business, finance and management. Business managers will need to
increasingly understand IT, feeding the emergence of a hybrid
professional with both IT and business skills.
At the same time, the entry of a new generation of youngsters from
2007 onwards, reared on the internet and computer games, will place
new pressures on the IT department. This workforce will demand
software applications that enable collaborative working and
multi-tasking. And these could take over from traditional
applications.
"The role of the IT profession is changing and incorporating more
business content," said Sambell. "We are expecting more business
people to move into IT. Whether you are an IT person or a business
person may depend more on your reporting line than on the content
of your job."
As this happens, many traditional IT jobs will disappear. Analysts
and programmers' positions will increasingly be seen as low-value
jobs suitable for outsourcing. With them will go the more
traditional career paths. It will become much more difficult for
senior IT professionals to learn skills and gain the experience
businesses need by working their way up through the ranks.
If the IT profession is to rise to these challenges there will need
to be a radical reform in the way employers and the educational
system develops and trains IT professionals, the report said.
"Roles that may take us 10 to 15 years to develop may need new
approaches in five years. There is going to be increasing demand in
these areas. More companies are becoming IT-enabled and it is quite
hard for them to develop this expertise," said Sambell.
The E-Skills/Gartner study has no immediate answers, but it is
clear that employers, universities and the government will have to
work more closely.
There is likely to be a new generation of IT degrees which place as
much emphasis on business and interpersonal skills as on
technology. IT will need to be incorporated into business
qualifications and non-IT related degrees. Further education
colleges will be encouraged to offer higher-level training in IT
that will meet the needs of employers.
"Employers, employees, na-tional and regional government, unions
and educators need to collaborate on an unprecedented scale to meet
this challenge and to ensure that the skills the UK needs, the UK
gets," said Karen Price, chief executive of E-Skills UK.
The next stage is for employers, government and educators to agree
a strategy. E-Skills plans to draw up an action plan, known as a
sector skills agreement, which will go out to employers for
consultation over the coming months.
Many are hoping that the agreement will finish the reforms
highlighted in the Stevens Report. If it fails, the cost to
employers and the economy could be high.
IT staffing: what the future holds
- Large numbers of people will be needed each year to fill
increasingly complex, high added-value IT roles
- The opportunities for greater strategic benefit from IT, the
need to deliver greater return on investment and the impact of
overseas outsourcing are leading to a stronger demand for broader
and deeper skills
- Innovative action is needed to address the gender imbalance
endemic in the IT workforce
- IT underpins innovation, competitiveness and service in every
sector. The UK has one of the best e-commerce environments in the
world, but this is not being matched by uptake by businesses,
government and citizens
- Business managers must be equipped to realise the potential of
IT. This is a challenge for leaders of all enterprises and
particularly for those in smaller organisations where there may be
fewer IT staff
- Most employees will need more sophisticated IT
skills
- Exclusion needs to be addressed. IT skills are as fundamental
as literacy and numeracy. Those who lack them will find their
personal and professional lives limited
- IT skills development requires new delivery methods that
integrate work-based vocational and academic learning and take into
account the impracticality of releasing employees from work,
particularly for smaller companies
- Government-enabled collaboration with educators and employers
is required to create new models of partnership.
Source: E-Skills UK/Gartner
The changing nature of IT: skills for the
future
Growth of e-commerce
IT professionals will need to understand the business drivers of
virtualisation and the relevant technologies.
Remote working
IT professionals will need to develop a secure IT infrastructure to
support mobile workers in a diverse range of environments.
Standardisation
IT professionals will be responsible for moving to an architectural
approach built on industry standards and pre-packaged components
and services.
Outsourcing and geosourcing
IT staff will need to develop new skills, including business
process and supply chain analysis, to manage offshore and domestic
outsourcing relationships. Technical skills in integration,
security and privacy will become more important.
Utility computing
The growth of utility computing will mean that IT professionals in
large organisations will be under pressure to deliver greater value
and have a deeper understanding of industry processes and
standards. Smaller organisations will outsource or buy IT capacity
on demand.
Information overload
IT professionals will need to develop skills, methods and
applications for dealing with vast amounts of data.
Security and privacy
Specialist security skills will be vital.
The rise of the internet generation
The exposure of the next generation of workers to interactive games
and online communities will lead to the emergence of applications
designed around collaboration and social interaction, challenging
traditional management styles and business cultures.
Source: E-Skills/Gartner