Welcome to the skills gap paradox
Employers say it’s harder than ever to recruit, while graduates struggle to gain a toehold
UK IT leaders say they’re finding harder to recruit technical skills than last year. At the same time, graduates in computer science and data science are struggling to find jobs. Welcome to the skills gap paradox.
The apparent mismatch between supply and demand has been blamed on several possible factors, as Computing has covered in depth recently. There’s the fact that graduates aren’t job-ready (which should come as no surprise as job training is not the purpose of a degree), together with a reluctance among employers to provide training. Automated recruiting systems may be encouraging generic applications, causing employers to miss out on genuine talent; good candidates may struggle to shine in traditional interview settings; and companies are making more use of unpaid or low-paid interns as a stopgap.
Recent research by ISC2 found that in the cybersecurity sector, an area where the gap is particularly cavernous, 31% of security teams employed no entry-level professionals at all, and 15% had no junior-level (1-3 years of experience) staff.
The overwhelming preference for experience over raw recruits is not an especially new phenomenon, nor is it confined to the UK. A quick web search brings up papers and articles from the 1990s that bemoan the gulf between employers’ needs and young technical workers’ expectations, but the situation has undoubtedly been made worse by the pandemic and associated economic shocks.
The Covid hiring binge and subsequent layoffs by tech companies means more experience has entered the marketplace, which might explain at least some of the difficulties experienced by graduates, for whom it’s a tough environment right now.
Nevertheless, in a recent Computing survey of 135 UK IT leaders, 35% said they found it more difficult to recruit skills this year, against 16% who said the opposite.
As noted above, there are several underlying factors, but the main one seems to be finances, particularly in certain sectors. Respondents in higher education, which is going through a funding crisis, were most likely to complain about budget cuts and uncompetitive salaries. But they weren’t alone.
A general picture emerges from the study of a hesitancy to invest in skills. There may be a gap between the ideal workforce and the existing one, but it’s manageable for now. The sluggish economy, incoming tax changes and a generally uncertain outlook were mentioned by several respondents.
Training new starters is expensive; newly-trained professionals may leave for greener pastures; and the pace of change means that technical skills are quickly out of date.
In these circumstances, organisations are more likely to “hoard” trusted employees, even if they don’t have precisely the desired skillset, rather than taking a chance on recruiting new staff.
Skills in demand
For those who are recruiting, software development roles and cloud expertise top the list of hard-to-obtain skills, with AI/ML and cyber just behind.
Recruitment issues in these areas were illuminated by some of the responses.
A data manager in a telecoms company complained of a “lack of commercial awareness” among job seekers. “There's a lot of people very technical but not with the skills and understanding to apply this to projects.”
The experienced allrounder or T-shaped engineer (someone with deep skills in one area and competence in many others), will always be highly sought after, but they may be hard to identify when most applicants are trying optimise their CVs for recruitment algorithms. Plus, of course, they can command a hefty salary.
“DevOps engineers for AWS are available on the market, but our organisation has not benchmarked this role to be competitive in recruitment,” said a head of DevOps in a professional society.
Other “emergent skills that are in high demand” — and thus hard to recruit and retain — include “good data scientists and experienced AI professionals,” according to a strategist in a government department.
And of course, where competition is fierce, not everyone can stretch to the upper end of the scale.
“Recruiting for a fair wage is tough for many roles, and retention for same reason as other companies are offering stupid money,” said a head of IT at a tech company.
However, as Computing discovered, even graduates with these apparently sought-after skills are struggling at the moment.
Unfortunately, neither the skills gap nor the job prospects for young professionals seem likely to improve in the short term. However, for graduates this should be a temporary dip, according to Stephen Isherwood, head of the Institute of Student Employers. Although it may not feel like it, time is on their side.
“We believe the future student jobs and career landscape is a positive one,” Isherwood wrote recently. “As the pace of change in work quickens, the long-term impact of demographic changes and higher skills requirements mean that the UK will need to increase its collective investment in the development of students.”