Lack of IT skills will make public cuts more painful

Open University says most graduates lack the mix of skills necessary to deliver efficiency savings through IT

Employers say many IT graduates lack business awareness

The government's planned cuts to public spending will be more painful than necessary because of a lack of IT skills, industry experts predicted at the 360IT conference yesterday.

Deep efficiency savings from pubic projects could be achieved through better use of IT, but that implies sufficient numbers of IT workers with a blend of technical and business skills.

"The coalition government wants to make huge cuts from government departments. It is quite obvious that some of the efficiencies they want can only come about through IT investment," Tim Rault-Smith, education consultant with the Open University (OU) told the conference.

About 150,000 people a year are recruited to the IT sector, said Rault-Smith, but four out of 10 employers consider the level of business, non-technical and interpersonal skills of new entrants to be below company requirements.

According to a CBI survey from 2009, 62 per cent of entrants to the IT sector need to draw on management and professional business skills almost immediately.

"There is a yawning gap between the skills new people come to the industry with and what they need from day one," said Rault-Smith.

In February e-Skills UK's news bulletin showed that the demand for programming jobs in the UK was decreasing, probably due to offshoring. But there was rising demand for computer service managers, senior business analysts, network and communications analysts and engineers, test analysts and development team leaders.

The OU is one of several universities working with e-Skills UK to deliver a post-graduate business skills training programme to new entrants to the IT industry.

E-Skills UK, or to give it its full name, the Sector Skills Council for Business and Information Technology, is a government-funded non-profit organisation that works with academia and industry to develop the e-Skills Professional Programme intended to give computer science graduates a foundation in business skills.

The post-graduate programme covers six modules: professional foundations; problem solving; leadership skills for IT-led change; management of change; project management; and business solution design.

At the end of the course, successful candidates are awarded a post-graduate certificate in IT professional practice. A further diploma and full MSc are planned for the future, said Rault-Smith.

These qualifications will also be useful for helping employees currently in IT "who are trapped by a glass ceiling" said Rault-Smith. IT people often report that once cast in technical roles, they cannot break out into wider business management.

The British Computer Society (BCS) was also beating the professional skills drum at the conference, showing software it has developed with the Skills Foundation for the Information Age (SFIA).

The role-profiling software is available to BCS members and generates a role profile from a matrix of skills and competencies that the user can select for any given role. The resulting output can be used to generate job ads, contracts and development programmes for candidates and incumbents.

It also provides a guide to aspiring candidates to show them what skills and experience they need to acquire to get to the next level.