Executive Summary

• The imperative for change
• Employer leadership
• Professional skills
• User skills (IT4all)
• Delivering the plan
• How to contribute

Sustainable, strong growth of the UK economy is critically dependent on the 'e-skills' of its people; the blend of technical, personal and business skills that enable organisations to take advantage of the Internet and other technology advances to grow their markets, cut their costs and improve the products and services they offer. This shift to e-business has rapidly become an essential pre-requisite for ongoing competitiveness in the 21st Century world of opportunity.

The winners and losers in e-business will be determined by access to skills. For the UK to remain a world power in the information age, pervasive, structural change is essential in the supply of IT-related skills ¹ . Employers must have ready access to the skills they need, at salaries they can afford.

12% of current IT jobs are vacant. An additional 150,,000 skilled IT professionals are needed every year. Constraint in the growth of the IT industry, and in the exploitation of IT across all sectors of the economy, is almost entirely due to the limited availability of professional skills. Employers in all sectors are complaining of lost contracts, project delays and compromised service levels due to IT skills shortages. Salary levels continue to rise, not only affecting competitiveness, but also leading to a surge in companies buying skills outside of the UK.

This strategic plan provides a vehicle for uniting interested parties around a common set of priorities, with employers, educators and government co-operating on a common agenda to address this unsustainable situation.

Industry has come together, in the form of the e-skills NTO, to address the critical e-skills needs of the UK. With direction from its employer-led Boards, the NTO has three distinct roles:

1. to improve the global competitiveness of the UK's IT industry
2. to increase the strategic exploitation of technology in other sectors by addressing IT professional skills needs
3. to take a leadership role in increasing the general IT competence amongst the workforce - people who use IT in their jobs.

For further details go to Part 1: Employer Leadership .

To address the professional skills needs of the IT industry and of employers of IT professional staff in other sectors, an agenda of 7 strategic objectives has been established, each of which has a number of priority programmes (documented in Part 2 of this plan). These cover the expansion of recruitment reach, along with radical action on training, qualifications and industry / education linkage.

Attracting increased numbers of high quality recruits into IT professional careers is a top priority, with a national promotional campaign, focus on broader recruitment pools and programmes to help transition new people from targeted groups into IT. The work readiness of new entrants to IT jobs is being improved by strengthening employer / education linkages, bringing curricula up to date, integrating work experience and creating a new web portal for national collaboration.

More relevant e-skills development pathways and qualifications are being made readily accessible, both to help new entrants to the workforce build their skills, and to meet the need for the constant updating of professionals' skills. This includes making proprietary qualifications available within national schemes.

Many companies are seeking help in assessing their skills needs for e-business exploitation; a new service to provide this will be launched, along with practical support in addressing their requirements.

Creating the best possible skills environment requires key partners in industry, education and government to have access to common information - regular, authoritative industry-wide perspectives of current and future e-skills requirements. Timely predictive information is thus a priority, explaining national, regional and local skills needs in a global business context.

The delivery of this plan will be underpinned by increased government investment that is directed to the strategic needs of UK businesses, and by increased employer participation in tackling these UK-wide issues.

For further details go to Part 2: Professional skills.

Generic IT user skills are already becoming as fundamental to employability as reading and writing. With almost all businesses now utilising technology for their day-to-day work, individuals without basic skills in the use of IT are increasingly disenfranchised from the employment market.

The segments of the population most needing increased IT user 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 IT skills, along with wider access to IT user training and easier ways of assessing the quality of that training.

Strategic objectives and priority programmes to improve the IT user skills of the general workforce are documented in Part 3 of this plan. These include a range of programmes to help people achieve qualifications, for example by making it easier for individuals to assess what is valued by employers. Particular emphasis is placed on skills for unemployed and socially disadvantaged people. Employers will be given a stronger voice in the development of curricula, so that students enter the job market with appropriate levels of IT literacy - from today's PC applications to tomorrow's wireless internet technologies. Solid data, expert prediction and international comparison will be provided within a series of regional hearings that unify local and national partnerships on a common agenda for action.

For further details go to Part 3: User skills.

Specific benefits of the programmes for both professional skills and IT user skills are outlined in Part 4 , along with information on the management, financing and resourcing of the plan. This plan represents an extension of the capability of the e-skills NTO, its partner networks and its financial underpinnings.

Current NTO resources include 34 employees and secondees from a range of current industry and education job roles, all of whom are dedicated to the delivery of this strategy. Development of partner networks is the chief method for extending capability.

For further details go to Part 4: Delivering the Plan

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.

This plan is intended to inspire the reader to take action. Attacking common priorities and working together, employers, educators and government can place the UK at the forefront of business in the Information Age, to the benefit of all its citizens. The reader is urged to get involved, starting by reading Part 5 of this plan, and filling in the Get involved form.

For further details go to Part 5: How to Contribute