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Time to get ahead in business

The lack of technical staff with real business skills is a perennial problem for the industry that needs to be addressed says Terry Watts, chief operating officer of government body e-Skills
Written by Andrew Donoghue, Contributor
Training Special Report
Time to get ahead in business
Andrew Donoghue
The lack of technical staff with real business skills is a perennial problem for the industry that needs to be addressed says Terry Watts, chief operating officer of government body e-Skills

e-Skills UK is one of several employer-led organisations that were granted government licences last year to handle skills development across a range of industry sectors. The organisation was licensed for five years as the Sector Skills Council (SSC) for IT, telecoms and contact centres. The SSCs operate under the auspices of the government's Sector Skills Development Agency, which replaces the previous network of National Training Organisations. IT companies such as Microsoft, Dell, BT and T-Mobile have representatives on e-Skills industry board.

ZDNet UK spoke with the organisation's chief operating officer, Terry Watts, about the skills-gaps that persist in the UK IT workforce and what government assistance is available for technical staff looking to boost their proficiency.

How have tighter budgets over the last two years impacted on the amount of training companies are prepared to offer their IT people?

It's hard to gauge. Over the last few years things have been so tight that companies have been looking to get the maximum amount of value from their existing resources. If you go back to the glory days of the dot com boom, people used to buy in skills if they needed them; recently companies have been focused on developing in-house skills because they're cheaper and they may have head-count restraints that prevent them from recruiting new skills. Training has been benefiting from that but it's still quite a tight market for the private training providers right now because there is a lot of competition on price.

Two to three years ago there was a lot of talk of a 'skills crisis' in IT. Obviously the industry has scaled down since then but are there still specific skill-sets that the UK is lacking?

I wouldn't call it a skills crisis anymore but I would say there are skills gaps. The survey we did last summer had 57 percent of employers said there employees didn't have the right skills for the business -- up from 47 percent the year before. There are a lot of people out there saying they have got skills gaps in their workforce but it's not the same as before when everyone was employed and there weren't enough people to go around.

What are the specific skills gaps that need to be filled?

There are still the technology areas such as Java and C# and things like that and network operations but also the business and project management side of IT are something people always mention.

So it's the same old story of a lack of technologists with real business skills?

Yes. It's been around for a while now but I think as people start to look around for new recruits -- as they begin to spend money -- then they'll be looking for more well rounded people as they go forward and training will pay a part in that.

Are you getting much feedback that recruitment is actually increasing at the moment?

Not a lot of feedback. We do a quarterly skills survey (the last one came out at the end of January/February) and it's showing a slight improvement and employers are claiming things are getting better now. It's not a case of 'all that is behind us now' but things are certainly looking better.


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A recent survey of employees' attitudes towards training from the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development found that over 90 percent of respondents believed the training they had taken part in had been 'successful' or 'very successful'. Training has been identified as a major motivator and in times of recession its value to employees and employers increases even more.
But constricted IT budgets over the last few years have had an impact on the amount of money companies are prepared to spend on something with long-term benefits like training. This lack of investment in staff is compounded by the skills crisis of the pre-bubble days which saw companies forced into hiring under-skilled staff just to make up numbers.
The debacle surrounding the government Individual Learning Account (ILA) scheme hasn't helped matters. Before the development of ILA's in 2000, individuals could claim back money on training under the Vocational Tax Relief (VTR) scheme. But when the ILA scheme was scrapped in 2001, incentives for individuals on private courses were not re-introduced. The government's answer is that the money that previously went into tax-breaks is now being more channelled into subsidised higher and further education resources.
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Training Special Report
Time to get ahead in business
Andrew Donoghue
The lack of technical staff with real business skills is a perennial problem for the industry that needs to be addressed says Terry Watts, chief operating officer of government body e-Skills

In terms of training courses, most people are aware of thing like the Microsoft MCSE or the Novell CNE but what generic or business type qualifications are out there?

Over the last 18 months we have started to see qualifications come out from awarding bodies like the City & Guilds or OCR which have elements of vendor certification in them. For example now you can do an OCR course with elements of the Microsoft Certified Engineer program included -- which means that when you get an NVQ it will be more relevant to the market. Although that sounds like a small change it was actually fairly revolutionary for the bodies concerned.

The other key thing that is going to happen is that a couple of weeks ago there was an announcement about Sector Skills Agreements. It's a process rather than a product at the moment but the idea is that the government spends billions of pounds that isn't necessarily targeted at the strategically important sectors; government now wants to direct the budget they have for training to meet the strategic needs of UK plc through the sector skills councils like us. We don't know how it's going to pan out yet but the sector agreements are going to be the mechanism by which the funding becomes more focused. This should all mean that, much more quickly, the supply side -- the colleges etc -- will become more market focused to the market's needs.

It's always a thorny issue isn't it -- the degree to which companies or industry should be involved in higher or further education?

Yes -- it's that difficult balance over whether to educate or whether to train. People in education have been doing it for years and years and know more about education than the industry.The problem you get to is the universities that are willing to respond to the market are often the more modern universities and polytechnics because they are more vocationally focused but the places that the big employers want to recruit from are the more established a prodigious institutions that are less likely to accept industry input because they've been around for hundreds of years. It's a dilemma we are in the middle of at the moment. The key thing is though, that at least it's a debate that is actually happening now. There is a lot of opportunity for businesses to get involved and influence the government agenda and we are looking for people to help us do that.

What about other financial help or tax breaks for training?

To be honest that is pre-judging what will come out of the sector agreements to an extent. But what we hope is that if we get sector agreements right and get the further and higher education colleges ready and able to deliver the things that industry needs then rather than having to go to more expensive courses then companies or individuals can go take advantage of publicly funded or subsidised training. So in that way government money will be going to employers if you like. I don't really see cash changing hands but we'll just have to see how it works out.

A lot of fuss has been made about the whole 'off-shoring' issue but what kind of impact do you think outsourcing has really had on the skills market here?

Generally it seems to be development type roles that are being outsourced but there are some signs that some of the higher value tasks may be outsourced. There was a big wave towards outsourcing ten years ago then everyone came back in-house again. Now it seems people are outsourcing selective elements of their IT operation rather than the whole thing. One company I came across outsourced everything but quickly realised that meant they couldn't set strategy anymore because they'd outsourced it to someone who didn't understand the business.


Nuts and bolts of Novell's updated CNE cert
IT certification is more valuable than ever
.Net certification - no more mix and match
Train your team to gain long-term benefits
Light methodologies make the most of team members
A recent survey of employees' attitudes towards training from the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development found that over 90 percent of respondents believed the training they had taken part in had been 'successful' or 'very successful'. Training has been identified as a major motivator and in times of recession its value to employees and employers increases even more.
But constricted IT budgets over the last few years have had an impact on the amount of money companies are prepared to spend on something with long-term benefits like training. This lack of investment in staff is compounded by the skills crisis of the pre-bubble days which saw companies forced into hiring under-skilled staff just to make up numbers.
The debacle surrounding the government Individual Learning Account (ILA) scheme hasn't helped matters. Before the development of ILA's in 2000, individuals could claim back money on training under the Vocational Tax Relief (VTR) scheme. But when the ILA scheme was scrapped in 2001, incentives for individuals on private courses were not re-introduced. The government's answer is that the money that previously went into tax-breaks is now being more channelled into subsidised higher and further education resources.
Demand grows for IT contractors
Brent fever hits Microsoft UK
Surveys give conflicting accounts of IT in the UK
Low-tech bosses 'wasting' IT investment
IT not so appealing to Indian students

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