QA is the UK’s leading training company in IT & Business Services, with particular heritage in technical learning for over 25 years. Since 2008, QA has expanded to become a broader education and training business by adding Apprenticeship and Higher Education divisions. With this in place, QA can offer the best of both worlds across commercial training and education, spanning from providing first jobs in the IT industry to master’s level degrees.
The Higher Education business division operates two major partnerships with University of Ulster and Northumbria University, whereby QA operates campuses in London and Birmingham across Business Management and Computing for both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees.
The Apprenticeship division launched in 2008, and now has over 2,000 apprentices on programme across Networking, Software Development, Cyber Security, Project Management, Digital Marketing and Data. QA was inspected in November 2013 and awarded Ofsted Grade 1 “Outstanding” in all areas.
This submission focuses primarily on professionals in the technology industry as this is our primary area of expertise.
There have been a multitude of research studies into the skills challenges facing the IT industry in the UK. The most complete of these was e-skills UK’s annual Technology Insights, which hasn’t been published since 2012 due to a lack of funding.
In the last of these reports, the following key trends and challenges were identified;
In trying to bring this up-to-date, www.itjobswatch.co.uk provides useful data on the labour market. For example, there were approximately 110,000 vacancies advertised in the 3 months to 5 September, of which 88,000 were for the full range of developer roles (see note in Appendix 1). Furthermore, the average salary advertised for these roles was 6% higher than the same time last year, suggesting above-average wage inflation due to a shortage of skilled professionals already in the industry.
On the ground, QA consistently finds that employers are experiencing this skills shortage in their day-to-day business. This gap has been consistent since at least 2005 and is becoming more acute as the economy returns to growth and London’s start-up scene is thriving.
The technology industry moves at a uniquely fast pace, due to the regular introduction and adoption of new technologies and the associated creation of new job roles. This is well-appreciated and it means that traditional education may always struggle to keep up. This is due to the inevitable time lag involved between the design of a new curriculum and the three to five years that it takes for full-time students to be educated and ready to join the workforce. The other danger is that in trying to “future-proof” curricula, the content can become a lowest common denominator based on those skills that don’t change, rather than working on the most current technology.
QA has found that Apprenticeships offer a much more immediate solution for employers. QA works very closely with our employers, both small and large, to identify their job role and technical requirements. Once identified, we typically develop a new programme and recruit apprentices to the roles within three to six months of identifying the need, which delivers a much more rapid response for employers.
The scale of the challenge and the gap means that the industry and government need large scale solutions over the next three to five years in order to close the growing skills gap.
Whilst the new Computing curriculum in schools will eventually bear fruit, industry cannot wait for the new crop of school leavers. Our recommendation to government is to look at the benefits of the Apprenticeship model and create new sector-specific programmes for non-IT graduates and career changers that are close to industry, work-based, driven by individual and collective company requirements, and on short development cycles.
The Tech Skills Partnership (funded under the Employer Ownership of Skills pilot) offers some good flexibility, but in the grand scheme of things, this is only a small number of new entrants to the industry.
These new solutions should drive mobility for professionals to change career into the technology industry. It’s important to note that mainstream SFA funding approaches tend not to fit the technology sector, as they are too reliant on regulated qualifications. In addition, the mainstream approach to funding in advanced learning loans is overly complicated for the low level of available funding relative to the cost of the training.
If a major programme of training and education were implemented to bring new skills into the industry over the next 5 years, this would enable a highly successful business–as-usual approach after that, which would coincide with the first significant cohort of school leavers who have studied programming.
QA is encouraged that most of the LEPs have an emphasis on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, and that some of those are more specific about digital and technology. We believe the LEPs offer an exciting opportunity for local responses and also some competition between regions and cities to become famous for their technology industries.
In addition, given the scale of the challenge, we believe these local efforts need to be complemented by a series of major national initiatives that can scale successfully to meet the size of the problem.
The aggregated statistics for developer roles is taken by including the following roles from www.itjobswatch.co.uk:
Developer | PHP Developer | C++ Developer |
.NET Developer | ASP.NET Developer | Lead Developer |
Senior Developer | C# ASP.NET Developer | Senior Java Developer |
Java Developer | Junior Developer | Senior .NET Developer |
C# Developer | Front-end Developer | C# .NET Developer |
Web Developer | Programmer | Software Engineer |
Software Developer | SQL Developer | Business Intelligence Developer |