Cash lost on poor skills initiatives

Government funds are being wasted on badly focused IT skills initiatives because of misconceptions about skills gaps.

An eSkills Summit report from parliamentary IT lobby group Eurim has also warned that many individuals have spent thousands of pounds of their own money and given up personal time on courses which they mistakenly believed would help them to find work.

"One of the big problems is understanding what is meant by IT skills. Unless we define what skills and which employers we're talking about, it's meaningless," said Eurim secretary general Philip Virgo.

The report said that 10 year-old figures about the state of the market are still being regurgitated, and that no survey of expected demand more than 18 months into the future has yet been worth the paper on which it was printed.

Although applications to study computing at university increased dramatically this year, the Eurim panel said that it fears courses are still not attracting as wide a range of people as is desired.

The report urges industry to focus more on retraining existing IT sector employees. But companies still discount experience in related fields or older technologies, which would not require major retraining, in favour of staff with like-for-like experience who can hit the ground running.