IT degrees leave gaps in expertise

Research suggests IT graduates are gaining soft business skills at the expense of technology know-how

IT graduates are leaving university without a good grounding in technical skills, a new study has warned, leaving UK firms with a shortfall of programmers and application developers.

According to IT recruitment specialist FDM, almost half of UK technology graduates feel that their degree course has failed to provide them with relevant skills. As a result, 41 percent of the 500 respondents claimed that with hindsight, they would have skipped university and gone straight into the workplace.

The study paints a worrying picture for the UK's IT industry. "We already knew that there was a lack of people going to university to study IT," FDM's chief information officer, Julian Divett. "But even those that do aren't qualified to do the job [when they graduate]." He added that many of the recruitment firm's clients had also complained of difficulty in finding staff with the right technical expertise.

While the previous slowdown in spending reduced the need for programmers, Divett said that now the market has picked up, so too has the demand for technical skills - a fact not being reflected in training programmes in the UK. He cited a graduate taken on by FDM from Pakistan, who had acquired a full range of Microsoft certifications a part of his degree course. "Here, you're not given the chance to get industry certifications, perhaps due to budgetary constraints, " Divett added.

Java and .Net are areas of acute shortage, the research found. Divett partly attributed the problem to universities being slow to update courses. "This is clear especially with programming languages, where universities are one or two generations behind the real world," he said. "For students taking IT courses, maybe only 10 percent to 20 percent is programming. University courses need more technical skills and less soft ones."

The same is true for broader initiatives aimed at increasing the IT workforce and targeting skills gaps, said Divett. "[Government-backed skills body] E-skills UK is doing something, for example with its new [IT Management for Business] degree. But it's targeting soft skills, while there's a shortage of technical skills," he added.

Part of the problem could be the rise in offshoring, Divett speculated. " There's a defeatist attitude here; that as more application development work is being done offshore, you might as well move it all off-site and just keep the high-level managers in the UK," he said. "But to assume you can miss out the programming or development stage of a career and jump straight up to the next level is naive."