Time to get ahead in business

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.