IT Skills Gap Whitepaper - Some thoughts

IT Skills Gap - Time for companies to step up

The recently released BCS Whitepaper on the IT Skills Gap provides some sober reading for those in business and education alike. One statistic that stood out for me was ...

'IT is the sector most affected by high staff turnover, with an overall figure of £1.9bn per year. The research suggests the average IT worker takes more than seven months to reach their peak productivity, at a cost of £31,808 to the business.'

This is interesting on a number of levels:

Surely 7 months is far too long to allow an IT worker to reach their peak productivity. This suggests that companies should be looking at their induction / on-boarding programmes in more depth and looking to find ways of securing a more productive worker in a shorter period of time. Of course, we all know the reasons for this tend to be a little self-fulfilling .... the new hire enters an under-resourced, over-stretched unit where no one has the time to fully bring them up to speed because their time is spent on 'must have now' activities. Thus the new hire has to find out much of what they need to know through a process of gradual 'osmosis'. And why is the unit under-resourced and over-stretched? Why the IT Skills gap of course!!

That £31,808 cost to the business for having a relatively un-productive worker for 7 months should wake up managers into thinking about the costs that they apply to on-boarding their IT Workers. Even for relatively small organisations such a cost is large and they need to develop strategies that reduce it over time.

The document pushes the ideas of broadening partnerships with local organisations and widening the talent pool from which to draw IT workers. This is the way I would go to address this on-boarding issue. Companies should look to have links with academic institutions, schools, colleges and universities and build those links into concrete opportunities for everyone. Actively engage with schools and colleges in the area to develop educational programmes that deliver the skills that you WILL require and the culture that you are looking to develop within your company.

If a group of companies worked together to develop one or more support programmes with local schools and colleges around computational thinking and computer programming or IT Service and Support then they could, with relatively little investment, start to develop a pipeline of potential IT professionals that would help them close the local IT Skills gap. CISCO started to do this with their CISCO Networking Academy but for many schools and colleges this ended up costing them too much money and other resources. The same was true to a lesser extent for Microsoft, although the costs their were less.

One of the best models I saw was back in the mid-90's where a local IT consulting company 'donated' some of it's consultants time to working within  local schools to teach pupils about computer programming. The best pupils were offered further training, free of charge to the pupil, with the expectation that within a year they would be earning the company money, whilst still learning, and that by the end of three years they would be ready to earn as a fully-fledged developer. The scheme worked because the company was local, they understood local conditions and knew the local schools and colleges who they treated as real partners.

They understood realities of education but counted that for every year they would be able to bring in enough new recruits to make it viable. They treated it seriously and worked WITH the schools and colleges to develop their educational programmes to not only fit in with the potential qualifications on offer but also to fit in with the atmosphere in the institution. They sent their BEST people into teach alongside the teachers, supporting the staff in schools to bring their programming expertise to the classroom activities and helping to give some validity to the process of developing computational thinking. As important, they brought an understanding of the current and near future needs of the commercial sector. After all they needed to have developers who would develop using the latest, most commercial technologies not ones that had been set by an exam board 3-5 years before.

Undoubtedly the cost to the company was considerable but they had done the sums and it made sense to them. It also made sense to the schools and colleges. Having experts from business working with their staff and students in the classroom was a real bonus to everyone.

Perhaps local Chambers of Commerce should initiate some activities that involve schools and companies that need IT workers working together to develop the skills, knowledge and cultures that will help reduce the local IT skills gap?

Both schools and companies will need to resource it appropriately but for companies it will surely help reduce that figure of £31,808 that it costs for a new hire to become productive?