Executive Summary
The Imperative for Change
The UK’s prosperity depends as never before on IT skills. Constraint in the growth of the UK’s IT industry is almost entirely due to professional skills shortages. The winners and losers in e-business will be determined by access to skills; the die will soon be cast for many businesses seeking to remain competitive in this e-world of opportunity. IT literacy is rapidly becoming as fundamental to employability as reading and writing.
For the UK to remain a world power in the information age, pervasive, structural change is essential in the supply of IT-related skills. Employers need ready access to the skills they need, at salaries they can afford. Industry has come together, in the form of the e-skills NTO, to address the IT skills issues facing the nation.
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Employer Leadership
With direction from its employer-led Boards, the NTO serves three markets. Firstly, it represents the IT industry, instigating programmes to improve the IT industry’s global competitiveness. Secondly, it is concerned with increasing the strategic exploitation of technology by companies in all sectors by addressing the skills needs of their IT professional staffs. Third, it takes a leadership role in increasing the general IT competence amongst the workforce – people who use IT in their job.
This strategic plan provides a vehicle for uniting interested parties – employers, educators, Government – around a common set of priorities, with the industry-wide leadership of the NTO Boards.
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Professional Skills
An agenda of 8 strategic objectives has been established to address the professional skills needs of the IT industry and of employers of IT staff in other sectors. With a need for hundreds of thousands more professionally skilled staff over the coming 3 years, increasing recruitment reach is imperative, along with radical action on training, qualifications and industry / education linkage.
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The e-skills NTO will lead a UK agenda to:
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Deliver industry-wide programmes to increase the number and quality of new recruits into IT professional careers.
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Deepen linkages between education and industry to improve the work-readiness of IT professionals.
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Increase investment in training by employers and government to up-skill IT workforce in line with industry’s strategic needs.
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Ensure the availability of a core set of IT qualifications and learning pathways to meet employer needs.
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Establish employer-led processes for classification of IT skills and quality of IT training provision.
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Improve the capabilities of companies to exploit e-business.
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Deliver authoritative industry-wide perspectives of future skills needs to employers, government and educators UK-wide.
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Continually expand the active participation of employers in formally driving the above agenda.
Further details, including priority initiatives to deliver against these objectives, are included at Part 2 of this plan.
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IT User Skills
Part 3 of the plan defines priorities for addressing IT user skills needs of the general workforce.
In this case, the populations most needing increased skills are existing workers and older potential recruits such as the unemployed and returners to work. These groups need to understand the imperatives for improving their skills, along with wider access to IT user training and easier ways of assessing the quality of that training.
More people will achieve qualifications if it becomes easier for individuals and employers to assess what is valued. Employers need to have a stronger voice in the development of curricula, so that students enter the job market with appropriate levels of IT literacy. Stakeholders need to align around a common view of priorities in this area, based on solid data, expert prediction and international comparison.
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Delivering the Plan
Specific benefits of the initiatives for both professional skills and IT user skills are outlined in Part 4, along with information on the management, financing and resoucing of the plan. This plan represents an extension of NTO capability, partner networks and financial underpinnings.
Current NTO resources include 32 employees and secondees from a range of current industry and education job roles, all of whom are applied to the delivery of this strategy. Development of partner networks is the chief method for extending capability.
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How to Contribute
For this strategy to deliver its promise of radical change and improvement, employers, educators and Government all need to actively engage in its delivery. This means investment of time and effort, and high-profile promotion of the aims of the plan, as well as financial support to particular projects.
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