Overturning stereotypes will help plug the IT skills gap

Get up out of your seat and take a look around you. What do you see? Let me guess: rows and rows of neatly laid-out desks, populated by high-spec desktop computers or laptops.

Maybe, if you are really lucky, your company allows you to have Christmas cards on your desk. And maybe, if you are really unlucky, your company makes you sit in one of those miserable cubicles, where personality and communication come second to keyboard interaction.

Chances are that the geography of your technology workplace is dominated by one type of individual: the young, experienced male.

It can be a depressing landscape. Just one in five UK technology workers is female.
Computing’s Skills Roadmap campaign has already highlighted the need for companies to pay more attention to women and working parents if UK plc’s demand for IT is to be satisfied in the next decade.

A growing IT skills gap means that business will soon struggle to find technically competent employees to fill technically demanding roles. But at the same time, many technology departments continue to overlook two potential sources of labour.

Graduates – particularly older workers – should provide a rich source of skilled labour over the next decade or so. Vocational qualifications provider City & Guilds predicts that the number of people in the UK employed into their 60s will have doubled by 2020.

At the same time, there has been a rapid drop in the number of students and school-leavers attracted to the IT industry. The proportion of under-25s in UK IT has fallen from 11.7 per cent in 1995 to just 6.7 per cent last year.

And a decline in European IT graduates could provoke a skills shortage as early as 2006, according to researcher Forrester.

So it is time to act. And that means we need to go myth-smashing.

The IT industry – despite horrible stereotypes perpetrated both by those working outside and within the sector – is not just a convenient home for the technology-obsessed misfits of society.

There is no generalised technology worker. The science fiction-loving social outcast is a creation of myth, one that has had painful repercussions for the industry.

Many talented individuals are put off joining the technology sector, scared by the thought of joining a technical clique that relies on a complex language of codes and policies.

Admittedly, the thought of untangling the myriad definitions of the 802.11 standards could drive any sane-minded person to the edge of psychosis. But calm down for a moment, and consider how the IT industry can provide a suitable career path for job-seekers.

The work is varied and interesting. A fast-approaching skills gap means that support, development, programming and management opportunities spring almost ceaselessly for the talented worker.

The continuing shortage should give the opportunity to move between sectors, because technology drives the processes behind the UK’s leading industries.

Retail companies’ supply chain efficiencies rely on innovative IT systems. Teaching in schools and medical care in hospitals are also powered by leading-edge applications. And the financial services industry uses research and development to help improve return on investment.

The IT industry is all around us. Its systems are inherent to our private and public sector organisations.

But the composition of labour needs a shake-up.

From next year, the European Employment Directive will protect the rights of individuals looking for work against unfair discrimination just because they are considered too young or too old.

So, what about the older worker? Would you now consider employing a 60-year-old?