IT skills training is the real issue

Taken at face value, the latest predictions on the growth of offshore outsourcing make gloomy reading for some. By 2015, 760,000 UK jobs will have been offshored - three per cent of all employment in the UK, according to Forrester Research. By that time, 150,000 European IT jobs will move overseas and 100,000 IT-oriented clerical staff in jobs such as data entry will go.

But these figures are just the cover of a much more complex book. For UK IT, the debate over offshore outsourcing should not focus on loss of jobs, it is far more to do with the skills and training needs of the industry.

Of greater concern to the long-term welfare of UK IT is the news that computer studies was the fastest faller in the A Level exams popularity league table. Where are the future leaders of the sector going to come from if school leavers have no interest in the subject? The glib answer from the anti-offshorers will be to claim that students see no point in training for a career that will see their job end up in India.

A better answer would be: why are we not training more people - students and professionals alike - in the skills we need tomorrow? The IT leader of the future will be a people manager, a business manager, a strategist, an entrepreneur, an innovator - not a technician, a systems administrator or a programmer.

The Synstar Pressure Point Index covered in Computing this week shows that more than half of IT directors are happy to hand over technically-oriented tasks such as infrastructure support, networking and data management to a specialist third party. The work they enjoy is IT strategy - defining how their organisation can become more competitive or provide a better public service through technology.

The work they outsource may go offshore, or it may not, that's all down to which supplier makes the best bid. It is far more important for UK IT to ensure the skills it will need are in place for when it needs them.