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Attracting new recruits into the ICT sector is critical for maintaining a healthy, competitive industry. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) fully supports sector-led initiatives to attract more young people into technology and help future IT professionals develop the blend of skills needed for successful careers. Such measures include the e-skills UK initiative, Revitalise IT, which promotes the image of ICT as an attractive area to study and work in. It also includes the work being led by the British Computer Society with other professional bodies to create a more professional IT profession.
BIS also fully supported the aims of the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing’s (CPHC) IT Community Conference, which was held in April 2008 at the University of Greenwich. This annual conference brought together academia and industry to address a range of issues central to the strength and growth of the IT sector.
It explored four key areas aimed at addressing the increased demand for well-rounded IT professionals with the cognitive business ability, skills, and knowledge to maintain the UK at the forefront of the digital environment. These areas included graduate employability; research, innovation and enterprise; professional structures and education in the workplace; and building a better image for the sector.
These aims were closely allied to those issues identified by the Information Age Partnership in the ICT and productivity report, Unlocking the Potential of Information and Communication Technology, published in June 2007.
The conference brought together senior academics and employers to debate some of the apparent tensions between the output from the IT further and higher education departments and what the business community wants; addressing falling numbers in IT and computing; and examining measures to up-skill the existing workforce.
IT is at the heart of the UK economy. The failing image of the IT sector does nothing to address young people’s perception of the sector and therefore fails to support its current or predicted growth. BIS fully supports sector-led strategies to transform the IT skills landscape.
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