Government urged to boost IT user training

Employment groups call for re-tooling of UK workers for the digital economy

Workers need to learn better IT skills

The government is facing calls from IT employment groups to provide better IT user training for workers to make the most of job opportunities during the recession.

Trade union Unite and IT skills body e-Skills UK have written to skills minister Paul Murphy with a series of recommendations aimed at re-tooling Britain's workforce for a digital economy.

Even before the downturn, a survey by e-Skills found that employers who report skills gaps said that more than a third (37 per cent) of their workers do not have the IT skills they need.

And over the next three years employers only see IT skills as becoming more important.

"Lack of access to affordable introductory IT user skills training ... is a major cause of exclusion from job opportunities and full participation in today's digital economy and society," says the letter.

"The recommended solutions are made ever more urgent and relevant by the current economic downturn."

The government's skills strategy is based around the Train to Gain programme, under which employers identify the training needs of their staff, and commission publicly subsidised courses for them.

But many employees who are only basic users of IT – such as checkout staff, call centre workers and warehouse staff – are not put on the scheme because it is not in the employer's interest to improve their skills.

These people, as well as those 17 million identified in a government consultation report as digitally excluded, and those whose firms do not engage with Train to Gain, risk being left behind in the skills market, warns Unite. They often cannot afford, and do not have the time, to retrain outside work.

Four solutions have been proposed by Unite and e-Skills to plug the training gap:

• Increase flexibility of funding under Train to Gain to allow learners to access funding even when the skills are not directly job related.
• A new funding stream which can allow providers to offer subsidised training to individuals, rather than employers.
• Introduce flexibility within Train to Gain allowing funding for those employers or employees who can demonstrate that the provision of IT training will facilitate redeployment of employees who would otherwise be at risk of redundancy.
• Working with unions to provide separate training schemes.