Five fresh approaches to solving the tech skills crisis

The glob­al skills cri­sis in the tech sec­tor has reached a high and threat­ens to derail the industry’s seem­ing­ly unceas­ing growth.

But such unprece­dent­ed skills short­ages are the result of a per­fect storm, accord­ing to recruit­ment con­sul­tan­cy Har­vey Nash Group’s Dig­i­tal Lead­er­ship Report. Tech lead­ers intend to increase their invest­ment in tech­nol­o­gy (60%) and relat­ed head­count (61%) this year to record lev­els. Yet, they are expe­ri­enc­ing reten­tion issues as employ­ees re-assess their pri­or­i­ties (80%) or opt to take advan­tage of spi­ralling wage infla­tion (40%). The UK has also been affect­ed by Euro­pean work­ers return­ing home, says Andy Heyes, Har­vey Nash’s region­al man­ag­ing direc­tor, UK South.

“From an eco­nom­ic point of view, the UK isn’t as attrac­tive as it once was due to Brex­it, the pan­dem­ic and a weak­er pound,” he explains. 

The area in which skills short­ages are cur­rent­ly most acute is cyber­se­cu­ri­ty, where 43% of dig­i­tal lead­ers are expe­ri­enc­ing hir­ing prob­lems, up almost a quar­ter over the past 12 months. Big data and ana­lyt­ics skills are next on the list (40%), fol­lowed by tech­ni­cal archi­tects (34%).

The tech indus­try has under­ly­ing chal­lenges in fill­ing job vacan­cies. While grad­u­ate entry is still the most com­mon path into the pro­fes­sion, uni­ver­si­ties around the world are not pro­duc­ing enough grad­u­ates to meet demand. Simon Short, chief oper­at­ing offi­cer of soft­ware and ser­vices provider Advanced, says: “There aren’t enough peo­ple in tech­nol­o­gy, which means we’re com­pet­ing for the same can­di­dates.”

But the sector’s focus on grad­u­ates also means the indus­try is miss­ing out on a huge amount of untapped tal­ent, accord­ing to James Bar­rett, region­al direc­tor at recruit­ment con­sul­tan­cy Michael Page Tech­nol­o­gy. There may have been a big shift in the num­ber of appren­tice­ships and boot camps, he says, but they’re still just scratch­ing the sur­face.

To tack­le the issue, about 51% of dig­i­tal lead­ers plan to cross-train peo­ple from oth­er parts of their organ­i­sa­tion. More than a third have also widened their geo­graph­i­cal recruit­ment net thanks to hybrid work­ing, the report reveals. But it still isn’t enough. 

Mark Wat­son, chief exec­u­tive of Fat Bee­hive, a web design agency for char­i­ties, believes that his­tor­i­cal race and gen­der bias­es have dis­suad­ed many peo­ple from pur­su­ing a career in tech. This has result­ed in the sec­tor being dom­i­nat­ed by mid­dle-class, straight, white males. 

As a result, the secret to solv­ing the skills cri­sis over the long term, in his view, lies in proac­tive­ly seek­ing out non-tra­di­tion­al tal­ent pools, not least to boost diver­si­ty. Here are four exam­ples of employ­ers that are doing just that.

Diver­si­ty of employ­ee back­ground, life expe­ri­ence and thought is vital in a sec­tor such as tech, which prides itself on inno­va­tion, believes Wat­son.

Com­ing from a non-tra­di­tion­al back­ground and an advo­cate of prison reform, he decid­ed to work with Code4000 and sits on its advi­so­ry board. The char­i­ty teach­es soft­ware devel­op­ment and basic skills to pris­on­ers, with the aim to cut re-offend­ing rates.

Fat Bee­hive, which employs 33 staff, has now tak­en on two of Code4000’s grad­u­ates and intends to hire anoth­er one each year. 

Wat­son explains the ratio­nale: “Com­pa­nies should use their pow­er, where they can, to do good. Giv­ing peo­ple a sec­ond chance is pow­er­ful in and of itself but it’s also good for busi­ness, indi­vid­u­als and soci­ety.”

Tan­gi­ble ben­e­fits include high lev­els of loy­al­ty as peo­ple under­stand and appre­ci­ate the chance they’ve been giv­en. Oth­ers com­prise the dif­fer­ent life expe­ri­ences that they bring to the table, which is great for prob­lem-solv­ing, he notes.

But there are chal­lenges. Many ex-offend­ers have grown up in chaot­ic, dis­or­gan­ised envi­ron­ments, which means they may need a bit more struc­ture and sup­port than oth­er employ­ees, Wat­son says. Con­se­quent­ly, each join­er at Fat Bee­hive is assigned a staff mem­ber to be their men­tor and their first port of call in case of prob­lems.

Wat­son explains: “You can’t just bring peo­ple in and expect them to fit into an alien envi­ron­ment. Some won’t have worked in an office before, so you adapt train­ing and sup­port to make it work.”

In the short term it is, he says, a more cost­ly and less effi­cient process than the tra­di­tion­al route to hire, although peo­ple don’t earn the same salary as some­one ful­ly trained. In many ways, he says, it’s com­pa­ra­ble to tak­ing on an appren­tice.

Ulti­mate­ly, it’s about weigh­ing up the pros and cons and work­ing to ensure suc­cess. “You can’t just take on an ex-offend­er and expect it to be hunky-dory. It needs more com­mit­ment than that,” Wat­son says.

You adapt train­ing and sup­port to make it work

Despite world­wide skills short­ages, the tech indus­try has a habit of throw­ing peo­ple on the scrap heap, whether it is old­er work­ers, women who left to have chil­dren or peo­ple with chron­ic ill­ness, Short says. As a result, he decid­ed to take a dif­fer­ent tack when eval­u­at­ing how to sup­ple­ment the soft­ware and ser­vice provider’s exist­ing UK work­force of around 1,800. Short is chair of trustees of char­i­ty Astri­id, which was set up by his friend David Shutts fol­low­ing a can­cer diag­no­sis. 

It aims to match skilled pro­fes­sion­als with long-term health con­di­tions, such as leukaemia, mul­ti­ple scle­ro­sis and long Covid, with employ­ers will­ing to accom­mo­date part-time, flex­i­ble work­ing arrange­ments. Once inter­est­ed par­ties have reg­is­tered on the charity’s web­site, an AI-based search ser­vice finds suit­able match­es and the char­i­ty makes the intro­duc­tions.

Advanced has already tak­en on one employ­ee to han­dle first-line tech sup­port via this route but intends to take on four more over the next cou­ple of months. The aim is to learn col­lec­tive­ly from the expe­ri­ence with a six-month review, Short says, before expand­ing the approach into oth­er areas of the busi­ness. 

Key con­sid­er­a­tions include train­ing man­agers to sup­port new join­ers effec­tive­ly and hold poten­tial­ly sen­si­tive con­ver­sa­tions to under­stand not only their capa­bil­i­ties but also their lim­i­ta­tions. 

“The thing with peo­ple with chron­ic ill­ness is that there aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly visu­al mark­ers of diver­si­ty, which adds anoth­er lay­er of com­plex­i­ty, espe­cial­ly if they feel anx­ious about how to man­age their day-to-day objec­tives and goals,” Short says. “It’s impor­tant to cre­ate a safe space to ensure peo­ple feel sup­port­ed and can build their con­fi­dence and man­agers have an impor­tant role to play here.”

At the more junior, 18- to 21-year-old lev­el, mean­while, the organ­i­sa­tion has aban­doned the stan­dard entry devices of CVs and grad­u­ate entry. Instead, can­di­dates’ capa­bil­i­ties and per­son­al­i­ties are eval­u­at­ed via an online cog­ni­tive apti­tude test before they progress to an inter­nal assess­ment cen­tre. 

“We’re try­ing to attract young tal­ent and raw capa­bil­i­ty into the work­force for the first time but also to sup­ple­ment it with more expe­ri­ence, which includes peo­ple with chron­ic ill­ness,” he says. “But while, like every­one else, we need skills and labour, the oth­er side of the coin is social jus­tice. We believe a key role of busi­ness is to sup­port soci­ety and the wider com­mu­ni­ty.”

In a world in which demand for skills is out­strip­ping sup­ply using tra­di­tion­al routes, says Stephen Pater­son, head of peo­ple and tech­nol­o­gy at AND Dig­i­tal, it makes sense to give oppor­tu­ni­ties to peo­ple with the right atti­tude and a gen­uine pas­sion for tech.

To this end, the dig­i­tal con­sul­tan­cy has teamed up with char­i­ty CodeY­our­Future, which trains refugees and oth­er dis­ad­van­taged groups to become web devel­op­ers. After pro­vid­ing the charity’s senior tech­nol­o­gy peo­ple with coach­ing and men­tor­ing on a vol­un­tary basis for a few years, the deci­sion was tak­en to hire two of its grad­u­ates: a steady flow of peo­ple every year is expect­ed. 

AND Dig­i­tal employs 1,500 staff but aims to more than triple this fig­ure to 5,000 by 2025. While it antic­i­pates that much of this recruit­ment activ­i­ty will take place via tra­di­tion­al sources, it expects a fair num­ber to come through inno­v­a­tive chan­nels, he says. Although no con­crete tar­gets exist at this point Pater­son says that if they find the right peo­ple, they’ll hire them. “As a source of tal­ent, we keep our hir­ing bar high. We’re not tak­ing on just any­body. It’s about giv­ing a gen­uine chance to peo­ple who are com­mit­ted to a career in tech and want to make a suc­cess of it.”

While the recruit­ment process is sim­i­lar to con­ven­tion­al agency hir­ing, pro­vid­ing refugee work­ers with effec­tive sup­port, par­tic­u­lar­ly ini­tial­ly, is key to suc­cess, believes Pater­son. After attend­ing AND Digital’s train­ing boot camp, which is com­pul­so­ry for all entrants, each par­tic­i­pant is giv­en their own 12-month coach­ing, men­tor­ing and train­ing plan.

They are also assigned a bud­dy and allo­cat­ed to a squad of 12 peo­ple, whose leader is their men­tor. A full range of well­be­ing and men­tal health ser­vices is avail­able, as is pro­fes­sion­al devel­op­ment train­ing. This includes lan­guage sup­port and help in areas, such as under­stand­ing what con­sti­tutes appro­pri­ate dress. 

Six of these squads then form a club of 80 peo­ple, each of which has its own office space, clients, and social and train­ing cal­en­dar. The aim of this organ­i­sa­tion-wide struc­ture, Pater­son says, is to ensure no one feels alone because every­one knows every­one else and feels invest­ed in – as if they’re part of some­thing small, but also some­thing much larg­er.

The idea is to pro­vide a ful­ly round­ed, holis­tic sup­port that isn’t lim­it­ed to career devel­op­ment but includes peo­ple devel­op­ment. That’s impor­tant because if peo­ple feel sup­port­ed, they’ll fly, he explains.

Adopt­ing impact sourc­ing – hir­ing can­di­dates from non-tra­di­tion­al and under­priv­i­leged back­grounds – as an approach to hir­ing tech tal­ent is not just a CSR com­mit­ment, it’s a busi­ness mod­el com­mit­ment, points out San­drine Asser­af, group man­ag­ing direc­tor and ESG lead at Web­help.

The cus­tomer expe­ri­ence solu­tions provider, which has a work­force of 100,000, was grant­ed the Impact Sourc­ing Provider Award this year for its inclu­sive employ­ment strat­e­gy. More than 4,400 peo­ple from non-tra­di­tion­al tal­ent pools were tak­en on at loca­tions across 25 coun­tries in 2021 and stan­dard­ised met­rics were intro­duced.

In 2022, the aim is to roll out the mod­el in each coun­try host­ing a new office. A fur­ther goal is to use the approach to hire 15% of all recruits in each of the supplier’s exist­ing 55 glob­al loca­tions by 2025.

But to make the vision a real­i­ty, each coun­try is required to com­mit to annu­al mea­sur­able tar­gets relat­ing to recruit­ment, reten­tion and tenure. They are also expect­ed to pro­vide join­ers with cul­tur­al bridge train­ing, ongo­ing career devel­op­ment and per­son­al sup­port. 

To achieve its goals, Web­help is part­ner­ing with gov­ern­ments and NGOs, such as Migra­Code in Spain and Haram­bee in South Africa, to cre­ate a holis­tic sys­tem where we all col­lab­o­rate to iden­ti­fy the broad­est tal­ent pool, Asser­af says. Ensur­ing clients under­stand and are on board with the approach is also con­sid­ered vital.

But tak­ing this kind of approach does require plan­ning. 

“If you wake up one morn­ing and a client says they want to start their project in two weeks, you’ll find it dif­fi­cult if you want to recruit this way,” Asser­af says. “Instead, you need to build net­works so you can hit the ground run­ning.”

While impact sourc­ing may be more expen­sive than con­ven­tion­al recruit­ment approach­es in terms of time, train­ing and resources, Asser­af believes the ben­e­fits out­weigh the costs. And not just for the indi­vid­ual and local com­mu­ni­ties con­cerned.

“It’s about cre­at­ing a sus­tain­able mod­el for the com­pa­ny, as peo­ple stay longer and have access to a bet­ter future, which means we cre­ate a built-to-last mod­el. Our clients are becom­ing more sup­port­ive of it. Indi­vid­u­als, the com­pa­ny, our clients and stake­hold­ers are all ben­e­fit­ing,” she says.

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