Tony Wheeler, project coordinator for classroom tech firm FormativeAssess, says “you can teach anyone to code”, but encouraging creativity is another matter. He feels creativity is being “sapped” from the education system.
Teaching coding as part of the computing curriculum set out to fill skills gaps by addressing them at an earlier stage, but firms still say they need workers with both technical and soft skills – and they can’t find people with this mix of abilities.
Finding a mix of soft and technical skills is also an issue for the creative industries, with the games, animation and visual effects sectors finding it hard to find creative types with digital skillsets.
Wheeler says: “There are teachers and educators working on fantastic things that would liberate children to expand their capacity to do fantastic things, but the system is acting as a block for anything innovative and creative.”
Coding and programming were important additions to the curriculum to ensure no one falls behind in the tech-driven world of the future, but the creativity involved in technical skills such as coding are often “not spoken about”, says Chloe Grutchfield, director of product and data at Verve.
Grutchfield says that when she was studying Java at university, she was initially “terrified” at the thought of having to program, and had many of the misconceptions that others describe about the tech space – that it would be boring or too complex.
“I wasn’t particularly interested in computers and assumed it would be counterintuitive and boring,” she says. “Actually, it was neither and it turned out to be one of my favourite classes and one where I got some of my best grades. It is creative, but often this aspect isn’t talked about.”
There are teachers and educators working on fantastic things, but the system is acting as a block for anything innovative and creative
Tony Wheeler, FormativeAssess
But Lyssa-Fêe Crump, catalyst of disruptive innovation at Headforwards, argues that creativity is often “championed” as part of the computing curriculum in schools, but teachers need more support in delivering these subjects to make the curriculum fit for purpose.
“Our primary school teachers are expected to teach a very broad range of subjects, and we often hear that there is not a lot of support for them to teach code,” she says.
“Children are naturally creative,which is clearly apparent if you spend time in a classroom full of them. What is needed is more support for the teachers to enable them to teach the coding part of the curriculum well in an engaging and creative way.”
It is also argued that more creative roles attract women into the tech space, and that supplying the opportunity to solve real-world problems is more likely to appeal to female candidates and encourage them into science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem)-based roles.
But Crump says there is a danger in suggesting that women will only be interested in creative roles in the technology industry.
“We need to be careful not to suggest that women are only suited to working in creative roles and not technical ones,” she says. “This stereotype is quite damaging when trying to attract women into Stem activities.
“There are a considerable number of women who work successfully in Stem industries and they are just as passionate about the analytical/technical side of their career as the creative side.”
But Crump says skills gaps should be filled by both men and women. “We should be encouraging more females into the industry, but also more males,” she says. “There is a massive skills gap worldwide and we need to consider ways of inspiring people of either gender on this career path.”
Patrick Malatack, vice-president of product for Twilio, says that making it clearer, both inside and outside schools, that coding and development are ways to express creative ideas, will attract more people into these roles.
“Seeing coding for what it is – a creative pursuit – has the potential to attract more diversity across the board,” he adds.
Malatack says third-party software platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Stripe and Twilio have helped to lower the “barriers to innovation” because it is cheaper and easier for anyone to use these technologies to implement an idea with little training. This helps to bring creativity back to the process by eliminating some of the more complex steps, he points out.
“Developers like to automate routine tasks, so most are already automated,” he says. “Developers would rather spend their time on creative activities.” This means the risk to their roles from automation is “limited”, he adds.
Geoff Smith, managing director for Europe at Experis, argues that creative and soft skills in tech people – the types of skills employers are looking for – will prevent tech roles from ever being fully automated.
“Gone are the days when individuals would hire developers who just sat in the corner and coded away,” he says. “What employers are looking for now is developers – people who can actually develop a system, implement an application, bring it to life in a business concept. You can’t do that if you don’t have the creativity and the business skills to bring it alive on the screen.
“They want the tech skills, but if they can’t get the tech skills, then what they want to try and hire is the confidence and learnability – someone who has the raw materials to learn something quickly.”
Read more about creative tech skills
Now more than ever, datacentres need creative employees to adapt and outwit problems for a more efficient, reliable IT infrastructure.
Cisco’s chief privacy officer talks about the language surrounding cyber security, how firms should be focused on growing tech creativity, and achieving equality inside and outside of the industry.
Some companies area already trying to address this. To promote creativity in the classroom, FormativeAssess is implementing artificial intelligence that uses machine learning to question students about projects and stimulate independent creative thought without teachers having to interfere.
Extending this into the workplace, Twilio requires all its new starters to use its platform to develop an application that meets some real-world need, encouraging them to combine creativity and tech.
Being too specialised or technically focused could be a handicap in the future, says Smith, who advises: “Be flexible and teach the need to learn continuously. If you learn something in a very deep way, if you’re a specialist in a niche field, who is to say that someone won’t create an algorithm to replace that?”