The future of the UK's IT industry hangs on its ability to attract and employ more women.
Women hold the key to plugging a critical skills shortfall that is affecting the entire UK tech industry, says the IT & Telecoms Insights 2008 report by e-skills UK based on Gartner research.
A survey of chief information officers last year projected skill gaps in every area of IT by 2010, with the largest rift in business intelligence and business process improvement.
Filling this hole will be impossible while the tech industry does not appeal to 51 percent of the population who are female, the report says.
Last year just 16 percent of tech workers were women, and the report warns that new talent in the IT industry is "diminishing at an alarming rate" as enrolments in technology-intensive courses decline and women remain unconvinced of a career in IT.
The report says: "Expanding the pool of IT talent is a business and national imperative as an increasing portion of UK GDP can be attributed either directly or indirectly to IT activity. IT jobs are increasingly disproportionately held by men. Gender balance in IT is not only an issue of social equality; rather it is central to the viability of an industry."
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The telecommunications industry's need for new skills will be driven by a swathe of its workforce reaching retirement age, the report says.
The report adds that the UK must reduce its reliance on skilled offshore workers and rebuild its domestic IT labour force to serve emerging areas such as analytics, information management, design and innovation.
The report tells IT professionals to change the way they "recruit, train and foster subordinates' career", particularly in government, and stresses the need for new teaching courses that interest students in IT and provide employers with the right mix of skills.
Talkback
We have enough skilled workers, just that they are too old to be considered any more.
I apply for jobs I could do but get turned down as experience isn't current; no relevant qualifications (apparently successful commercial experience doesn't count when compared to MS noddy exams); over qualified; not technical enough; too technical; basically any excuse except the real one, I am old; yet they still carry on unsuccessfully looking for months.
"to plugging a critical skills shortfall"
It would be interesting to know what those skills are.
I admit I think there should be a balance between men and women, young and adults in any company. And the percentage of women working in IT in the UK is low.
As a Scandinavian (man pig) I would however suggest that when the percentage of women in a IT company exceeds, say 48%, then start selling your stock.
Women are extremely good at lots of things but innovation is not in that group, but still an inportant part in IT.
Women will operate the washing machine better than men, but they did not invent it. What a pig I am.
So what skills are you talking about, "business intelligence and business process improvement" is not good enough.
Bye the way, Yellowcave had a good point in "MS noddy exams".
Microsoft is actually killing IT because you are never more than a user working with Microsoft and that is not enough if you need IT professionals.
The most funny thing is that a Microsoft "professional" is more or less worthless without "Unix" experience even if he was involved only in Microsoft stuff.
[[ new talent in the IT industry is "diminishing at an alarming rate" as enrolments in technology-intensive courses decline and women remain unconvinced of a career in IT. ]]
*Women* remain unconvinced??!
I am male and have been in the IT industry for the last 20 odd years and I would quite happily stand up in front of a crowd of school leavers and do my level best to convince them to chose something else as a career. I simply cannot in all good conscience recommend IT as a good career path for anyone except those who are so gung-ho they wouldn't listen to me anyway.
It is (as a generalisation) sexist (as per article), ageist (see copious other comments) and managed in many cases by people who know nothing about the technology and so nothing about what is and isn't possible and how long things should take; but think they do because they can grok Excel. The PHB (Pointy Haired Boss) in the Dilbert comic strips is only funny because it's so true you either laugh or jump off something very tall.
For those of us who have been doing this so long we don't know what else to do, we have yet another problem. The recruitment "industry" has dropped it's old approach of understanding the job, understanding the skills and desires of the applicants and fitting the two together to make a long term employee. That turned out to be far too expensive and time consuming. In common with many other "Lowest Quote Gets the Gig" situations, they now do the bare minimum and give the pile of applications to a child with no knowledge of the industry to pattern match the characters in the CV with the characters in the job spec and send through the closest 10% to HR, who do much the same.
Old timers, like me (at 42 !!!) don't stand much chance because an 18 year old "Executive Recruitment Consulting Engineer" sees us as fossilised relics of an earlier age. The youngsters don't get much of a look in either because they have no hope of surviving the pattern matching exercise having never dealt with these exact versions of these exact products. The folks in the middle? Well for them it's pot luck if they have (or have claimed) experience of version 2.3.456b of the Sproggit database server. Version 2.3.455 is no good at all. The character strings are different. The product is all but identical of course, but no, the version string differs so you're out.
Maybe I am exaggerating for effect, but if you are a manager trying to recruit for a new post; how much of the above do you actually recognise? If you are a recruiter, how long do you really spend getting to understand the jobs and the applicants? Mewling about the time it takes will not do, this is the actual job, anyone can pattern match, it's down to you to interpret and assess. It's why you get paid so much .. and that's a historical hangover from when all this fluffy pre-interviewing and getting to understand stuff was the norm. I'm old enough to remember it. In fact I got my second job through exactly this process and was there for 8 years.
IT is a massively diverse industry, there is SO much to know that nobody is going to know all of it, or even a very very small part. Surely we must therefore look for people *will* (future tense) be able to do the job without too much difficulty. We must find people who have a good grounding in all the relevant skills and good experience of similar or related products. The odd one who fits the bill exactly, straight off the CV, is going to give you a couple of months of profit over the ones who need a little while to catch up. But what about thereafter? You want to hope that they also happen to be a decent engineer, because after that head start is all used up, the others who were a near but not exact fit would have caught up and would now be showing their real mettle. Is that first couple of months REALLY so important that it outweighs the next N years? Come on now. We all see those same adverts running again and again for months and months! Admit it, it took you 3 months to get the paperwork round the system to recruit this post in the first place.
That would tie up with a couple of facts.
I tried to get to see one consultant as I thought they would do a better job once they met me, no chance, most of them only want to deal by email now!
I once planned and ran release exercises for a company on a par with IBM, I also used to roll out upgrades to 1000+users, have designed and implemented software solutions for a large police force, however I "cannot" be considered or put forward for project manager or product manager roles as the "senior roles" have to have a 100% match and experience had to be done within the last week. I could not get my head around this as the "last bloke has left" and it used to provoke much head/wall interaction, but you have explained this for me. Now looking for aforementioned tall object!