Narrowing the tech skills gap

The pan­dem­ic turned mil­lions of office-based busi­ness­es into vir­tu­al com­pa­nies overnight, inevitably result­ing in a greater reliance on tech­nol­o­gy.

This means it is arguably more impor­tant than ever to invest in employ­ee devel­op­ment and tech skills. Even pre-pan­dem­ic, gov­ern­ment fig­ures showed eight out of ten adver­tised open­ings required some lev­el of dig­i­tal skills.

Organ­i­sa­tions should be seek­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to reskill and upskill peo­ple from all back­grounds, and devel­op careers in the high-growth, high-demand tech sec­tor. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly rel­e­vant giv­en the well-pub­li­cised short­age of tech and dig­i­tal skills in the UK.

But the skills gap also means busi­ness­es will need more flex­i­ble ways of mobil­is­ing tal­ent, says Mo Isap, founder and chief exec­u­tive of train­ing, con­sul­tan­cy and dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion ser­vices provider IN4.0 Group.

The firm expe­ri­enced more than 80 per cent growth dur­ing the COVID-19 lock­down, com­pared to the same peri­od last year. It has seen spe­cif­ic demand for data ana­lysts and inter­net of things engi­neers, with com­pa­nies need­ing to ensure their data is acces­si­ble in the cloud.

“The uncom­fort­able truth is that although many busi­ness­es are try­ing to under­go dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and inno­vate in the face of a glob­al cri­sis, they lack enough top tal­ent to get them there,” says Isap.

“And while there are plen­ty of grad­u­ates emerg­ing from our world-class uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem, they aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly ‘work ready’ with the right blend of tech­ni­cal exper­tise and soft skills. It’s not like busi­ness­es can wait either. This is an acute prob­lem that needs to be solved right now.”

Connecting talent to address skills gaps

The organ­i­sa­tion has, there­fore, launched the IN4.0 Tal­ent Acad­e­my, a skills train­ing pro­gramme designed to address the dig­i­tal skills gaps across Greater Man­ches­ter and Lan­cashire.

“It has been designed to act as a bridge con­nect­ing tal­ent from diverse back­grounds with busi­ness­es in the North West that need to dri­ve dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion,” says Isap. “We run a 12-week pro­gramme, which acts like a bonus term for grad­u­ates to build on their aca­d­e­m­ic achieve­ments.”

The course com­pris­es a blend of soft skills and tech­ni­cal know-how, includ­ing accred­i­ta­tions from Ama­zon Web Ser­vices (AWS) and the Insti­tu­tion of Engi­neer­ing and Tech­nol­o­gy, plus a work place­ment.

How­ev­er, it’s not just young peo­ple who ben­e­fit from skills train­ing. There have been sev­er­al IT ven­dor-led ini­tia­tives focused on pro­vid­ing often-over­looked can­di­dates, such as the long-term unem­ployed, refugees, asy­lum seek­ers, old­er peo­ple and vet­er­ans, with the skills to enter or re-enter the work­force.

AWS re/Start is a skills devel­op­ment and train­ing pro­gramme that pre­pares indi­vid­u­als for careers in cloud com­put­ing and con­nects them with poten­tial employ­ers. The pro­gramme is focused on reskilling the unem­ployed and under­em­ployed, such as young peo­ple with lit­tle or no tech­nol­o­gy expe­ri­ence and ex-mil­i­tary per­son­nel and their fam­i­lies.

Tech­nol­o­gy and engi­neer­ing con­sul­tan­cy BJSS has opened its doors to sev­er­al ex-mil­i­tary AWS re/Start grad­u­ates. They have been so suc­cess­ful that BJSS has now built its own ver­sion of the pro­gramme to fast track suc­cess­ful par­tic­i­pants into full-time roles.

“While we can recruit high­ly tech­ni­cal and capa­ble grad­u­ates from uni­ver­si­ty, there is a lot to say for peo­ple who have expe­ri­enced life, trav­elled the world, devel­oped a range of skills and worked under pres­sure,” says Michael Ford­ham, cloud con­sul­tant for BJSS. “Our ex-mil­i­tary recruits tend to be prag­mat­ic, strate­gic and focused on col­lab­o­ra­tion.”

Building basic digital skills

Accord­ing to gov­ern­ment data, more than eleven mil­lion peo­ple in the UK lack basic dig­i­tal skills, while four mil­lion work­ing adults are with­out any dig­i­tal skills. One of the biggest chal­lenges will be reskilling those peo­ple who may need to tran­si­tion from less-skilled, man­u­al roles to work with dig­i­tal plat­forms for the first time.

“Reskilling them to become dig­i­tal oper­a­tives will be an under­tak­ing and busi­ness will have respon­si­bil­i­ty to help make it pos­si­ble, along­side effec­tive region­al eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy,” says Phil Jones, man­ag­ing direc­tor at busi­ness tech­nol­o­gy solu­tions provider Broth­er UK.

At the oth­er end of the skills spec­trum are the dig­i­tal spe­cial­ists, who work in the tech­nol­o­gy sec­tor – coders, ana­lysts and sys­tems archi­tects – and above them, in the top 1 per cent of the dig­i­tal hier­ar­chy, the dig­i­tal sci­en­tists.

How­ev­er, Jones notes that while a rel­a­tive­ly high pro­por­tion of UK GDP comes from the dig­i­tal econ­o­my, a third of its employ­ees are non-UK nation­als, so there is a short­fall at all lev­els which needs to be addressed.

“We shouldn’t need to rely on over­seas tal­ent, although it’s always healthy to have the bright­est and smartest brains, and the obvi­ous uncer­tain­ty of what our post-Brex­it immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy looks like makes this an issue we can’t afford to ignore,” he says.

The pan­dem­ic has high­light­ed our depen­dence on tech­nol­o­gy. As busi­ness­es look to embrace this new real­i­ty, they must pri­ori­tise invest­ment in ensur­ing employ­ees are pro­fi­cient in the lat­est dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies or they risk being left behind.