Skills Survey 2007: Industry falling out of love with IT grads

The quality of computer science graduates is falling, according to results from the exclusive silicon.com 2007 Skills Survey.

Just a quarter of survey respondents agree or strongly agree with the statement 'computer science courses turn out high-quality IT graduates' - a drop of 10 percentage points on 2006's result, and a further drop on the year before, when 37 per cent of survey-takers agreed or strongly agreed grads were high calibre.

Moreover, in this year's survey, the percentage of respondents who opted not to record a view on the quality of grads - high or otherwise - increased, from 34 per cent last year to 45 per cent this year, suggesting there are greater levels of uncertainty in the industry about new starters in IT.

So what could be causing companies to view graduates with increasing ambivalence?

Nick Pears, admissions tutor for undergraduate courses at York University's Department of Computer Science, one of the most highly rated computer science (CS) departments in the country, says there is definitely a "shrinking pool" of students taking CS courses. And he describes the subject as "very clearly an academic discipline".

Skills Survey 2007

Find out the results of this year's Skills Survey:

♦  Are CIOs getting less cash?
♦ How the staffing crisis is deepening
♦ How techie salaries are faring
♦ Offshoring still a hot potato
♦  Banks hardest hit by staff crisis

"We try and teach principles of programming," he explains. "We teach it from the ground up," which means right from the fundamental "digital electronics", through architectures and OSes and up to the software programmes that sit on top.

The aim is to produce graduates with a strong understanding of the fundamentals so they can adapt to the specific needs of industry, says Pears: "The idea about having good graduates is having them adaptable. Because, at the moment, flavour of the month is Java but by the time they graduate it may be something else."

In the short term, there is therefore inevitably some tension between what industry demands - graduates who can be set to work as soon as - and universities that aim to give students the broader picture, rather than a specific skill set.

Pears says: "We feel we do provide the skills [for business] but we don't provide direct training for a particular job because then we couldn't cover all possible jobs that were out there. So it's our job to provide education in computer science to produce someone who can adapt quickly to the needs of business."

He adds: "I think to some extent it's up to industry to provide the training."

In addition to the academic side of the degree course, CS students at York have the option to do a year's industry placement - around a third of current undergrads are doing this, according to Pears. And there are other non-assessed course modules for picking up workplace skills, says Pears. But again it is up to students to take the initiative to attend lectures.

Someone who has put the 'quick adaptor' theory into practice is Louis Rose, who did a Computer Systems and Software Engineering degree and then a Master of Engineering at York. During his undergraduate course Rose did a placement year working for IBM in Winchester and is now back at York doing a PhD.

While working at IBM, Rose says he had to learn three different programming languages that he hadn't used before - something he found wasn't "that difficult".

He tells silicon.com: "At uni you're taught the concepts that you need to pick up a new language so I actually found that, although on a day-to-day basis I wasn't applying exactly the same skills I applied at university when I was studying, [the degree course] provided me with a good foundation to pick up the skills that I needed to do my job at IBM."

Rose also believes diversity in today's computer science field makes it difficult "to be an expert in a particular domain until you go and work there for a number of years". He says: "I always anticipated that when I went out into the workplace that wasn't the end of my training and there would be a fair amount of graduate training - a couple of years - before I felt competent and able to do my job to the best of my ability."

He adds: "I think one of the most important things about doing a degree is showing that you're motivated to do it for a number of years and that you have the ability to be taught. I think that's sometimes a bit more important than the actual skills that you have."

The fast-paced, multi-faceted world of tech is not unique in being set against the methodical world of academia - employers in all industries frequently voice complaints about graduates not being 'ready' for the realities of work.

But the UK's IT industry has its own particular pressures - from a general falling off of numbers of students enrolling on tech courses, to a shifting playing field of priorities. IT systems are increasingly important to almost every aspect of a business, which means greater complexity in administering, maintaining and scaling such systems. This does not sit easily with an academic teaching philosophy designed to cover 'fundamentals'.

This is the view of another former CS student - Rob Chapman, CEO of IT training company Firebrand Training (formerly The Training Camp). Chapman believes "complexity" in today's IT world and the demand for "niche skills" means it's far harder for universities to prepare students for the workplace.

He explains: "All the different middlewares that are taught that are connecting large complex ERP applications together - these are massively rich complex environments," contrasting this with the commercial world of 20 years ago, when IT was "still very much siloed".

Chapman continues: "Now you go to any reasonably large organisation and they've probably got a collection of large, complex systems that are all connected together. So maybe the reflection from the industry in terms of the quality of the grads is that the IT world has accelerated its pace and its depth and breadth in terms of complexity, and the grads are drifting away from having sets of skills that can be used."

But the technical tug-of-war is heading in a very different direction if you consider the impact of offshoring, which has shifted a portion of technical and developer work out of the UK, causing an increase in demand for IT workers who have so-called 'softer' skills, such as project management and communications.

Chapman says: "I suspect a lot of the more mundane jobs are being pushed offshore and the jobs that are being left behind that people now label as being in IT require somebody to have the skills to go and talk to the business, to understand what business problems are, where opportunities lie to drive the business forwards - which is a different skill set than just knowing technology."

He adds: "I very much doubt it's being taught to grads. It's too complex."

The issue of training is unsurprisingly close to Chapman's heart - his six-year-old former start-up business is now a £9m company and has trained more than 12,000 students to date. Chapman points to a dramatic increase in demand for business training in particular. "We're now running in the UK a full Prince2 training class every single week of the year, whereas two years ago we were running one a month," he says.

Earlier this year, an IT Management for Business degree was launched in the UK, with the backing of government, tech employers and universities, which aims to combine technical learning and business skills. It is currently offered by 13 universities around the country. IT industry body Intellect sees this type of hybrid degree course becoming more important.

Carrie Hartnell, a programme manager at Intellect, tells silicon.com: "You're always going to need the very technical. I think what most companies would want is somebody who came out with a computer science degree, where relevant, but that had taken a module or two with a business element in there. And more universities are doing that."

But even as the world of IT becomes ever-more enmeshed with the world of business, the number of university degrees that include technical components are on the rise - and this has the effect of broadening the pool of possible tech recruits, according to Hartnell. Pointing to the proliferation of new media degrees and the UK's "thriving" games and film industries, she says: "Increasingly, everything we do has to have a technical element.

"We need to broaden our minds about what type of graduates we take on. And also make sure the graduates understand that they have skills that maybe they don't realise they have - and take for granted because it's part of their degree. But actually those skills can be used in a technology company and could create a great new innovation or a great new process."

Ultimately, however, companies are going to have to recognise the importance of investing time and money in training new recruits in order to mould them to their specific needs. Or else look to alternative solutions to gain the skills they need - such as offshoring or sourcing skilled staff from overseas.

Firebrand Training's Chapman tells silicon.com: "I look at the amount that undergrads are taught across a year and then I look at how much we train people in a week - it's chalk and cheese in every respect. It's so slow, the speed at which undergrads are taught information - and in IT every 18 months everything changes… I don't really know how a three- or four-year degree programme keeps up to date and that's not to say that they're worthless but it's an interesting conundrum."

The results of the silicon.com 2007 Skills Survey are based on responses from 721 individuals, most of whom reside in the UK.