Partner Article

Campaigning for Skills & Investment

By Charlie Mayes, Managing Director, DAV Management

In January the Education Secretary Michael Gove announced he was scrapping the existing ICT curriculum. In its place, he will introduce new courses of study in Computer Science. He blamed the previous Government for dumbing down ICT and suggested that children are not learning technology skills in schools; they are merely learning how to operate a computer. This view was supported by Ian Livingstone of EIDOS, co-author of the recent NESTA report ‘Next Gen’, who recently stated that “40 percent of teachers think that ICT is computing and it is absolutely not.”

In the past, in many schools ICT had become solely focused on the use of office productivity software. And national education policy had also conflated computing with digital literacy. This resulted in many schools confusing the two and in my opinion not properly supporting either. The consequence being that this has led to a lost generation who don’t have the right technology skills to support our existing workforce. The changes announced by Michael Gove are aimed at correcting this and the government seems to know what is required now, but it will take years for planned improvements to filter through the education system.

So what signal does this send about the importance the past and existing government places on nurturing the ICT skills of the next generation? Right now you would be hard pushed to find a business that is not reliant on Information Technology and this lack of investment doesn’t bode well for the future competitiveness of British business. Indeed Bernadette Brooks, general manager of the educational ICT association Naace, argues that the government’s lack of emphasis on ICT is “a cause for concern” at a time when UK competitors are investing in technology skills: “If you look at the policy statements from President Obama and from Hong Kong or around the world, technology is identified as a key component for a 21st century education.”

Worringly, this comes at a time when wider investment in skills in the UK is also being reduced. The abolition of advisory body Becta and the £100m Harnessing Technology grant are creating new challenges. The halting of the Building Schools for the Future programme will reduce the funds available for ICT. Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, believes that the 80 percent cut in capital spending for schools will impose massive limitations on their ability to invest in ICT. “When you’ve got a choice between fixing a leaky roof and a new computer, you haven’t got much choice,” he says. “So I think we will see a dramatic decline in ICT in schools over the next few years.”

Today the UK faces intensified global competition from Europe and the fast emerging Asian economies. In order to compete on this global level Britain must have the right skills, competencies and abilities in the workforce to sustain economic potency. The right skills for a ‘work ready’ labour force will be paramount. With the pressure however on government spending cuts and in light of these recent developments, is Britain in danger of not having the right skills or not investing enough to get the appropriate level of competency within business?

There are also other dimensions at play within the IT business sector to consider – one of which is the impact that outsourcing and offshoring has had on the development of IT skills in the UK. In the 80s and early 90s many organisations took on a high number of graduates and trained them in the latest technical skills. Once trained these graduates moved around the industry rounding their own knowledge and cross-fertilising ideas, practices and cultures developing a strong UK based IT services industry. Today such comprehensive training programmes and, even, apprenticeships are sparse – although there has recently been a push to bring back apprenticeships with National Apprenticeship Week (5thFebruary) taking place last month. But in the current climate businesses will be slow to hire and, as a result, UK plc is in danger of not developing programming talent or core technical skills in the same fashion as it did a couple of decades ago. As a result, if organisations look to bring back a lot of the operations and programmes previously offshored, which appears to be a growing trend, then in all probability they won’t be able to find the skills to build the new onshore teams.

Indeed in my experience this problem runs even deeper. This is not just about a lack of internal technical investment; many major IT programmes have been outsourced and as a result management does not have the experience themselves to deal with an insourced operation. The same rules apply to the outsourcing industry. In many of the larger outsourcing deals, the outsource provider will typically offshore a lot of what they do because labour is cheaper and the skills more readily available further exacerbating the problem; so, in many cases, even the outsourcers no longer have the requisite UK based skills. Over the past decade and in particular since the recession started, too often organisations look at the bottom line costs rather than value delivered. In the quest to reduce costs business often lose sight of the end goal. On a macro level I think this is what has happened with ICT training and provision in schools - it has been dumbed down to the detriment of the nation.

Investment is important and the old adage ‘you get what you pay for’ often holds true. At DAV, we find that when it comes to hiring external help there can be the tendency to look at the cost of services alone, rather than the value-add that those services might be able to contribute to the business. Potentially two less skilled people may be hired for the price of one experienced resource, but if it takes those two people three times or even twice as long to achieve a less beneficial result then ultimately they are the more expensive option. Similarly many organisations also fail to recognise that one more expensive, but more experienced person, could be saving the company millions of pounds that someone of a lower rate wouldn’t even begin to recognise or generate, irrespective of the amount of effort spent.

Of course, it is not easy to put an absolute value on the qualities that more skilled and experienced people are able to bring into an organisation such as drive, leadership and judgement. These are less tangible deliverables. The danger is that if services have been priced low it often means that they won’t be undertaken with the prerequisite skills or experience the customer may be looking for.

At DAV what we’ve seen over the years is that with inadequate investment and the wrong resources, large technology projects or programmes have taken much longer than planned to deliver, cost significantly more into the bargain and, in many cases, do not deliver the anticipated benefits. All too often the skills simply aren’t there to plan and manage the delivery of large scale IT and business change programmes; and to make matters worse organisations frequently fail to invest in buying in the right skills to plug the gap ensuring the same mistakes will be made when the next major programme of work needs to be delivered.

To go back to my opening statement, if basic knowledge and understanding is not established within the education system, meaning that we probably now have a generation lacking in foundation skills and experience, and if businesses are reluctant to invest in getting the right resources in to develop existing staff, how will we nurture these skills in the next generation? The worry is that if there is no opportunity for children to learn in school and no opportunity to learn in the market place, then we are in danger of having future generations that won’t understand ICT at all. It’s a popular view that Britain’s future strength will flow from innovation and world class services, but if this is the case and we aren’t investing in the skills required to nurture innovation, particularly in technology, how on earth will we remain competitive on the world stage?

Collectively we have a duty to take action now to prevent this from happening. Changes are afoot within schools but these will be slow to be implemented. For example, at DAV our goal is to help develop people through knowledge and support. Regardless of the point at which we engage on any project or programme, we work closely with our clients’ internal teams to involve and empower people, transferring knowledge, providing guidance, mentoring and developing skills to ensure that the internal team is equipped to continue once we depart. It is a small step in light of the current skills situation but if every organisation took this approach, collectively we would pass on and benefit from our shared knowledge, while we wait for the education system to catch up.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Andrew Moore .