Some of the very tightest labour markets in the UK at present are faced by employers operating in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector. There are many more jobs available than there are people available to do them, and this has created a chronic skills shortage that has lasted for several years. The major areas in which demand for skills is increasing are in the fields of data science, information exploitation, cyber-security and the management of change when new technologies are introduced in organisations. In all of these areas demand for qualified and experienced data professionals is increasing very rapidly month by month and year by year. The IT sector is growing at over 30% the rate of the rest of the economy and is creating 2.8 times as many jobs.

There are several reasons for the skills shortage. First, not only is the UK educating insufficient computer science graduates each year, but their number is hardly growing at all. In 2016 there were only 5,600 students across the whole country studying computer science at A level compared to 31,000 who were studying sociology. Of these only 600 were women. As a result, the IT field is very heavily dominated by men (84%) and this is thought to put some women off from considering a career in the field.

Secondly, because the technologies are developing so fast, data professionals have to train and retrain continually to keep their skills and knowledge up to date. This is costly and time consuming, making it more challenging than is the case in most fields to recruit and retain people with the relevant knowhow.

Thirdly, skills shortages in this area are international, as are many of the labour markets concerned. Migrating from country to country is not a problem for highly qualified data professionals as working visas are always made available to those with the rarest skillsets and most up to date qualifications. The big tech companies compete furiously for the relatively few people who are available to do the jobs they have on offer, meaning that top UK talent is regularly recruited to work overseas in places like Silicon Valley where the pay is very high. Retaining people once a company has trained and developed them is often a steep, uphill task. This is particularly so for smaller companies who can never compete in terms of wages with their bigger rivals.

Fourthly, the profession has a major image problem. Rossi (2016) explains that he has ‘spoken with people both young and old who assume that technology companies are monotonous, anti-social mole holes that attract awkward introverts’. Until many more people – particularly young people – start viewing these jobs as the well-paid, engaging occupations that they often are, the skills shortage is likely to remain very chronic.

Questions

1. What major, long-term steps could the tech industries take themselves to start addressing the skills shortages that they face?

2. What in particular could be done to attract many more women into the data professions?

3. In what ways could the UK government help to address the skills shortages? What case can be made for investing more public funds in this area?