When it comes to teaching IT, the UK’s education system is flawed. Despite today’s generation of students growing up with technology, the number pursuing further IT education is falling dramatically.
There has been a 33 per cent drop in ICT GCSE students in the past three years, a 33 per cent drop in numbers studying A-level ICT in the past six years and a huge 57 per cent drop in A-level computing students in the past eight years in England, according to a recent study by the Royal Society.
The problem of fewer young people studying IT has also been highlighted in recent months by Ofsted as well as many employers and universities.
“The biggest issue is the negative effect the current system will have on future careers in this sector,” said Margaret Sambell, head of strategy and planning at e-skills UK.
She said that 10 years ago, IT was more of a back-office function, but today IT and business strategy are inextricably linked.
The issue faced by employers is that the education system is not producing the mix of IT and business skills required. According to the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC), most in demand in the permanent market are Microsoft .Net skills, IT security skills and roles such as business analysts and systems architects or systems developers.
“Whereas it used to be: ‘Can you find me a .Net developer?’ now it's can you find me a .Net developer with oil and gas experience, or pharmaceuticals experience. If they have that sort of skill, they have a better chance of finding a job than somebody who hasn’t,” said Dave Pye, executive committee member of the REC’s technology sector group.
Sambell agreed that there has been a shift in the types of IT roles in the UK. “With globalisation, a lot of programming and testing work [which was the traditional route into the IT industry] is sourced overseas and the work in the UK is much more centred on business integration of technology,” she explained.
E-skills’ research shows that the roles that are most in demand are in IT management, strategy and planning, as are software professionals who can deliver business benefit from technology.
“That means the skills we need are more sophisticated than ever before because we need not only the deep technical capability but also people who know how to apply that to deliver business benefit, and that is quite challenging,” said Sambell.
“So as well as needing more people, we also need higher skills as well as a more complex blend of skills.”
Many people in the industry argue that the problem should be addressed at schools and colleges where students have their first experiences with IT, because this is where they are currently losing interest.
Universities are not convinced that IT and computer science qualifications at GCSE and A-level offer any sort of preparation for a career in IT. The University of Oxford’s Computer Science Department is more interested in students who possess logic skills, and encourages applicants to study maths A-level over any other subject.
“If you want to be a computer scientist, study maths,” said Andrew Ker, Oxford University lecturer in computer security.
“I am very worried about ICT and computing A-levels. It is obvious in candidates I interview that they do not motivate students to forge a career in computer science and I am not convinced that these courses actually teach ‘computer science’ at all,” he added.
Employers have also set out to improve IT education themselves. Fifty employers clubbed together five years ago to create a degree programme, in partnership with e-skills and 13 universities, called Information Technology Management for Business.
“Students on this course are learning how to manage technology projects as well as derive business benefits from technology. They are being snapped up by enterprises as they come out the other end. Businesses are taking these people into accelerated graduate programmes because they have these skills that employers find so valuable,” said Sambell.
But while the youth hold the key to the future of the industry, REC’s Pye said that, for the present, employers need to be careful not to overlook older IT workers, as they are often undervalued.
“There are a lot of older people in IT; people who are 50-plus with many important skills, but employers sometimes take youth over experience even when the latter would suit them better. They shouldn’t forget that experienced people can always pass on their knowledge to a younger generation,” he said.
Over the last 7 years or so schools have forced all students to take an ICT qualification at GCSE Level or equivalent. Qualifications like DiDA (Diploma in Digital Applications) and OCR Nationals were introduced which allowed students to gain up to 4 GCSEs from a single subject, in the time it would normally take to do one. The obvious benefit here was to schools' exam results allowing their headline figures for the press to rise significantly. Schools are typically judged on the percentage of students who achieve 5 or more grade A-Cs. With these ICT qualifications students would only have to gain 1 GCSE in another subject in order to tick this box.
The downside with this is that students were drastically put off the subject. Students rebel when they are forced to do a subject they didn?t particularly want to do in the first place and ultimately vote with their feet when choosing future qualifications. The reason for the sudden drop in the last 3 years is that schools have slowly stopped forcing students to do the ICT qualifications in this way. They now only have to do 1 hour of ICT per week; anything above this is optional and the students are choosing not to do it.
The other problem with school ICT lessons and qualifications is that they haven?t moved with the times. The children of today grow up with ICT from such a young age. They pick up new skills and are proficient at using computers at a much younger age than they used to be. Most children of age 8 are now familiar with using Windows, Office and using the Internet for IM, email and Google. Yet, when they arrive at Secondary School at age 11 these are the very skills which are on the curriculum. They quickly become bored with the lessons covering topics that are too easy for them and become dis-applied. This again is giving them a bad experience with ICT and so students are put off taking ICT into further and higher education.
Schools need to adapt quickly and change the ICT curriculum which is on offer. Secondary?s need to communicate better with the primary schools so they know what ICT has already been taught and ensure they don?t cover the same ground. An ICT course should be interesting and exciting for students. The world of ICT is changing at a very fast pace and the challenge for schools is to keep up with developments a foot, the problem here is that the children pick up on any new technologies much faster than the teachers do.
Posted by: James 20 Aug 2010
This article touches only the tip of the iceberg, and the rate that students will move away from IT will only increase.
The threat from outsourcing as one reason was mentioned, but there are other reasons why IT is such a turn-off for students, and I will list them here.
1) Outsourcing. People say that companies look abroad due to being able to hire people for a fraction of the cost of the West, but this is just one of the reasons. In reality, there are another two: First, the number of IT graduates scrambling for a handful of jobs in places like India means that the hirers have the luxury of selecting only the very best. For example, I have an Indian colleague here in IT with a first-class honours degree in physics. After graduation in India, he went for his first job - a data entry clerk. Two hundred people turned up for the job. The employer said: Go away anyone who has not got a first. 50 people stayed. Then he had to fight off the rest in various aptitude tests. He is one clever cookie! Lastly, the employment laws are non-existent in these far-off exotic lands. A few years back I noticed that several of my Indian colleagues seemed to be working 16, sometimes 18 hours a day. I once asked them, and they said that they were scared as the employment redundancy / dismissal notice period for a non-manager was 15 minutes, and 3 hours for a manager. Unless you were seen to be working for nothing way over the odds, you could be replaced at th drop of a hat. What international IT employer would not be drawn to the attractiveness of these three scenarios? Students aren't daft. They can read the newspapers and they all know that IT is not a growth area in the West.
2) Salary. Fifteen years ago, IT people were well-paid compared to most other graduates of the same age, but not any more. Not only has pay been stifled over the last few years, but other trades have caught up.
3) Linked to salary is the sheer difficulty of subject. Elevated IT salaries were deserved due to the complexity of the subject and the rate of change; an IT person has to put in many hours unpaid to read manuals late into the evening, do test installations, programming etc, just to keep up. They have to re-learn their subject every 5 years. Students are now acutely aware of how fast technology changes; who wants a career where you have to stay up late unpaid reading documentation and programming for several nights a week, when your humanities graduate friend (who did no work at all over 3 years of their degree) is earning as much as you are as some 'council outreach worker' or 'media researcher?'
4) It is NOT a profession for the vast majority of workers, and students are realising this as much as IT people in the industry. Most importantly, my Indian colleagues are all coming to the same conclusion that it is not a good profession. The Indian educational ethos, certainly for the children of educated immigrants, is that you study really hard and diligently in order to enter a profession. However, the reality is that your interpersonal skills (read that as professional skills) become terribly under-developed, as most of the time you sit in silence, your head full of abstract thoughts about debugging your Unix script of why some thread is throwing an exception. Twenty years into your job, your technical skills are defunct and you have no other skills to offer anywhere else! The only 'professionals' in IT are people working in business consulting, or technical managers who have moved beyond code into roles where they have to travel and do presentations. Most IT roles are a *coalface* job, not a professional job. The industry tries to trick you into thinking this by calling IT a 'profession' but it is not - and people and particularly students, are waking up to this. None of my Indian friends are going to encourage their children into IT; the 'favoured' professions are shifting back to the traditional ones like medicine, pharmacology and accounting. I am certainly going to go out of my way to enourage my own children away from IT.
However therein lies the problem! These professionals are the ones, as you say, that the industry is crying out for. But you can't just expect a graduate to be able to do this after a year in the programming department. These people are typically middle-aged and have decades of technical experience, and with fewer and fewer people entering the industry and employers unwilling to spend five years training people, these professionals, in the West, are a dying breed.
Be worried, Britain, be very worried.
Posted by: nick 19 Aug 2010
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