Training Toolkit

Story: UK sees worst IT skills shortage for a decade

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It starts at school

When I were a lad, back in the early paleolithic, we were taught Computer Studies, which was a ground up course in what a computer is and in general terms how it works. We had hard drives with the cases off and short animated films showing the data going too and fro. We used a programming language called CESIL, Computer Education in Schools Instructional Language. It was kind of like assembler, only it had a PRINT command with preformatted output alongside register shifts and such. The lessons I took then, some 25 years ago would work just as well today AND THAT'S THE POINT. The fundamentals haven't changed in the slightest. By half way through my teens I understood, in general terms what went on inside a computer and the sorts of things it could and couldn't do. From that grounding, learning the specifics of how to use a given app was a very short step, and the same went for the next version of the same software or indeed a different package doing the same thing.

The kind of computer education you get in schools today is entirely superficial; a term on Word version XYZ; a term on Excel version ABC. Not how to use a word processor, just which button to press in Word. It will be obsolete, by the time they leave school, let alone a quarter of a decade later. Sure it gets quick results, but they are only skin deep and they don't prepare people for a working life with ubiquitous IT, let alone future IT people.

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