Tackling the skills shortfall

Companies aiming for growth need the right IT talent: Nik Rawlinson talks to industry experts about how to attract and keep the best applicants

- Nik Rawlinson

Whether you're a dedicated software house or a brick-and-mortar retailer, IT is an essential underpinning of your business. That doesn't just apply to developers, but to managers, support staff and numerous other roles. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) recently reported that more than 80% of all jobs advertised require digital skills; the World Economic Forum's latest Future of Jobs Report notes that "over 85% of organisations surveyed identify increased adoption of new and frontier technologies and broadening digital access as the trends most likely to drive transformation in their organisation".

The problem is, skilled IT staff don't grow on trees. And finding them today is harder than ever, for a variety of reasons including rapidly evolving technologies and the administrative overhead of hiring from overseas. So it's no surprise that DCMS reports that "employers say the lack of available talent is the single biggest factor holding back growth. Estimates suggest the digital skills gap costs the UK economy as much as £63 billion a year in potential GDP." In short, if your business wants to grow, it needs to compete for finite human resources. That means rethinking how to go about attracting and retaining the IT skills you rely on.

Where are the graduates?

In past decades, the UK was a major centre for technology professionals. "From the very early days of IT, Britain had a really strong cohort of hobbyist programmers, which evolved into a really strong core of programmers," Dominic Harvey, director of CWJobs (cwjobs.co.uk) told us. "That kept us ahead globally."

"But," Harvey continued, "I think because we were so lucky with that, we assumed it was going to continue when tech permeated every part of the business, as it does now. We've done very little, educationally, to make sure that that was really entrenched in our education system."