IT pros getting younger, claims BCS

The British Computer Society (BCS) is claiming success in its efforts to pull in young IT professionals as part of a recruitment drive to boost membership figures.

The society has taken in 7,500 new members in the last seven months and says that the average age of applicants has fallen from 37 to 29, that of fellows from 58 to 43 and that of full members from 40 to 30.

The boom in new memberships is the result of a drive by BCS chief executive David Clarke to make the society more inclusive. After an extraordinary general meeting in September, 2003, the society petitioned the Privy Council to make changes to its membership structure.

Members are now graded in three groups; chartered members, non-chartered professional members and non-professional members or those without a first degree in IT. The society has long missed out on the potential of its roughly 14,000 student members. After graduation if they did not have the three or four years of experience they needed to become full members and fell by the wayside.

The new structure now provides for a wide range of IT practitioners such as managers, project managers and health informaticians to become members. It has also started a corporate membership scheme which numbers IBM and the Royal Bank of Scotland as early adopters and this programme has added around 1,000 to the membership.

Clarke said in a statement: "Future skills requirements are going to be about the application of technology rather than simply the writing of programming codes. Only those professionals who understand the need to develop their skills in entirely new areas will score true successes."

Before the changes, the BCS had around 40,000 members, which it estimated was only five per cent of the UK's ICT professionals.