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Leader: Why we don't need more techies
Business and interpersonal skills are more important

By silicon.com

Published: Wednesday 02 August 2006

The most telling point in the latest study to highlight the growing IT skills gap in the UK is that, in fact, the biggest problem is increasingly around "non-technical" skills.

One in five companies is having difficulty filling IT vacancies, according to the e-skills UK quarterly 'state of the nation' study of IT skills and recruitment trends.

But while there are the usual shortages in technical areas such as systems design, businesses are complaining about the lack of business and interpersonal skills among applicants for vacancies.

This is backed up by the findings of silicon.com's own annual Skills Survey, which found this year that the business skills most in demand are project management and leadership.

Undoubtedly, as British Airways CIO Paul Coby said himself this week, government and businesses need to address this urgently in order to avert a future skills crisis that will seriously impact the global competitiveness of the UK.

Some people point to the declining numbers of students applying for IT, computer science and engineering degrees at university and say more needs to be done to attract people to these courses - but that isn't necessarily the right approach.

Could the answer instead be to introduce some of the technology-related aspects of IT executive roles into broader business degrees and qualifications?

For many of today's generation of outgoing CIOs, there was no other way to get on the ladder other than with an IT or engineering background and that, to some extent, was a reflection of the more hands-on nature of IT professionals in the early days of enterprise computing before the advent of the internet.

But that's no longer the case, as more and more of the 'grunt work' is outsourced or offshored. As Department for Work and Pensions CIO Joe Harley told silicon.com recently, the IT department of the future won't be a place for someone who wants a career in application development but it will be a place that demands a highly capable group of people able to manage big projects and contribute to wider business strategy.

There will always, of course, be a place in organisations for some specialised and deeply technical staff but the future captains of industry are unlikely to start their careers with an IT degree.

A good example of this shift is the new degree in information technology management and business now offered at Lancaster University. It's a small step on the right road but there needs to be a much closer alliance between business and academia if the UK is going to be able to produce the right calibre of IT leaders of the future.