Leader: IT skills in the UK

The industry group e-skills UK, which sits between government, business and education to build policy on skills issues, has today released a comprehensive plan for the IT and telecoms sectors.

It underscores the need for better IT skills for both those working as IT professionals - and everyone else, the IT user. It also points to an insatiable need for IT workers, saying employment in the industry will grow five to eight times faster than the UK average.

e-skills recommends a lot of sensible-sounding if not earth-shattering proposals, such as making IT careers more attractive to young people (especially girls), offering new IT degrees and diplomas, providing additional training for the current workforce and building a better framework for IT pro and user qualifications.

That is, they are sensible sounding if you agree with the premise that we need more people with strong IT skills.

There are two quite different categories of workers alluded to in the plan: IT users and IT professionals.

While most would agree users could stand to be a bit more tech-savvy, it's the IT pros we're interested in.

Evidence suggests there is a skills gap and that employers have a hard time finding the right person for the job. Yet it's somewhat contradictory. In silicon.com's 2005 Skills Survey, for instance, over half of respondents agreed there was a skills shortage while two-thirds said their businesses were able to fill IT vacancies.

Ask any unemployed IT pro and you can bet what his opinion will be.

Even if currently there is an IT skills shortage, what's the point of bringing up tech-savvy kids and retraining workers when the industry is ever-more frequently sending IT jobs overseas?

The UK could lose as many as 250,000 UK jobs to offshoring by 2010.

Which means we could end up with a skilled-up workforce which must move to China, Eastern Europe or India to use their talents.

The e-skills effort does make more sense when looked at from the IT user perspective. The group aims not only to provide workers for the IT department but to create skilled individuals for all types of positions, as more and more jobs require at least some computer knowledge.

And there also it shows that even as we offshore jobs, the need for IT skills in the UK will never go away - because IT has become woven into the fabric of everyday business.