Employers and the IT profession need to find ways of
encouraging more people to take up computer science at university
if the country is to avoid a crippling skills shortage within four
years, the British Computer Society has warned.
BCS president Nigel Shadbolt wants large employers in both the
IT sector and the wider economy to join forces with professional
bodies to avoid a shortfall in computer science graduates.
Shadbolt, who is also professor of artificial intelligence at
Southampton University, said, "The effort will need to include all
the stakeholders: the Department for Education and Skills, the
schools sector, the relevant governmental agencies, the
professional bodies and employers."
The BCS will meet with all the relevant organisations in the new
year to draw up a plan, he added.
Employers and IT professionals have to accept that the
universities are producing insufficient numbers of graduates to
meet demand, Shadbolt said. They also need to confront the reasons
why the number of people starting computer science degrees is still
falling.
"I do not want them to decide that we cannot match what is going
on in other countries because the danger is that the market for IT
professionals in places such as India is growing so fast that they
are having difficulty filling their own vacancies," Shadbolt
said.
The call for action comes one month after academics found that
fewer than 13,000 new computer science graduates join the IT labour
market each year.
According to the Council for Professors and Heads of Computing,
in 2005, some 12,804 people out of 31,450 who had started a
computer science course found IT roles with UK-based employers.
The number of graduates that will be available to employers in
future years is likely to be even lower because the number of
first-year computer science undergraduates has fallen since 2001.
The number of first-year undergraduates in 2004/2005 was
25,640.
Shadbolt said universities need to take on at least twice as
many undergraduates as employers require.
Roughly half of undergraduates fail to find IT work with UK
employers because they fail the course, find work overseas, or they
are overseas students who return home after their course
finishes.
Further information:
www.cphc.ac.uk
www.e-skills.com/cgi-bin/go.pl/newscentre/news/news.html?uid=586
www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.6713
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