The UK needs more data engineers and analysts to fuel the data-driven economy post Brexit

Nesta's skills taxonomy shows the UK needs to do more to grow data wrangling and analytics talent

The UK needs more data engineers, data scientists, developers and those with advanced analytics skills as uncertainty over Brexit looms, threatening to limit the availability of talented individuals from abroad. In future articles, Computing will be investigating what the UK is doing to bridge the gap, but first here is a look at the skills that are in demand.

Innovation organisation Nesta recently produced a UK skills taxonomy based on the analysis of over 10,500 skills derived from 41 million UK job adverts and clustered using machine learning techniques.

The taxonomy was produced to investigate key shortages in the type of skills required for the UK to thrive in the data-driven economy. It combines various factors including the demand for skills by employers, the current supply of those skills from workers, and the potential supply based on courses offered by education providers and employers. Nesta says this depth of analysis was not possible before since the UK authorities do not formally measure these factors.

By analysing the job ads using machine learning, Nesta was able to avoid common problems caused by semantic differences in the language used by employers and academics. Because it derived directly from data rather than imposed in a top-down fashion, the taxonomy is easy to extend and update.

Nesta demonstrated some analyses made possible by the taxonomy in a blog post. Unsurprisingly, the study shows data and analytics skills are both in demand and highly paid.

Software development skills came third on the list of those in demand, behind social work and care giving and general sales. The highest paid IT skill is mainframe programming, presumably because of the continued popularity of such systems in banking and the rarity of those familiar with Cobol and CICS. Next was data engineering - including big data, Python, data science and optimisation - followed by a cluster of subcategories including IT security, servers and middleware, BI and data warehousing and business analytics.

Image credit Nesta

Analytics skills were also found to be in high demand in education, sales and marketing, where those with skills in market analysis, SAS, SPSS and data mining can attract a salary worth far more than that of their peers

Nesta also grouped the various skills by their value combined with the growth in demand over the period studied (2012 - 2017). Measured this way, data engineering (which includes data science) came top, being at once in demand, in an area experiencing rapid-growth and commanding high levels of remuneration (see image below).

App development and web development and IT security skills also scored highly on this measure, possibly reflecting the fact that these are relatively new areas where employees often struggle to find experienced recruits.

Image credit Nesta

Nesta hopes the taxonomy will be used by decision makers in government and education to address skills shortages in areas required to support an economy that's becoming ever more data-driven and which faces many challenges and uncertainties.

"Skill shortages are a major issue in the UK and arise because there are not enough people with particular skills to meet demand. The Open University estimates that skill shortages cost the UK £2bn a year in higher salaries, recruitment costs and temporary staffing bills. They can also significantly hamper growth. According to OECD research, the UK could boost its productivity by five per cent if it reduced the level of skill mismatch to OECD best practice levels," authors Jyl Djumalieva and Cath Sleeman said.