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The Brampton Factor: Is there really a skills crisis?
Or is muddled thinking the real problem…

By Martin Brampton

Published: Wednesday 09 July 2008

Confused IT skills policies in schools and colleges are part of the problem. But they're being combined with a widespread failure to tap into existing talent, says Martin Brampton.

The perennial skills shortage seems nowadays to have been transformed into a training crisis. Schools are boring IT students to death, and it's the fault of universities that computer games companies are struggling to recruit. How do we get it so wrong?

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It's worth going back to basics and asking what we are really expecting of our education system - and why we expect it. It's been a while since my schooldays but it comes as no surprise to hear that IT lessons are boring.

Why should they be any different from other lessons? As I recall, the lot of school children includes a good deal of boredom. I was persuaded that any book that could be described as literature would be dull and wondered what could be the use of history and geography.

Given that most children find school lessons boring, one has to ask why there is a belief that introducing a subject into schools will encourage students to take it up as a career.

It would seem far more sensible to do exactly the opposite, and make sure that children are not put off possible careers by tedious lessons. On the whole, this used to be the case. As a schoolboy, I had very little idea what most adults did for a living, unless they were school teachers.

There is another reason for doubting whether it is a good idea to foist IT lessons on school children.

Only so much can be taught at school. The confusions and policy switches that have surrounded the national curriculum only confirm that pushing subjects into schools inevitably requires something else to be pushed out.

And in many cases, the IT topics that are taught are vulnerable to rapid obsolescence and are therefore of reduced long-term value.

So the idea of a career in IT might well be more attractive if the subject were kept out of schools - except there is another problem. Students considering career options are influenced by the prospects.

For years now, much of the talk in IT has been of how to avoid giving work to people in this country, on the grounds it can be done more cheaply elsewhere.

Young people with an eye on a viable career naturally look for sectors where the work is not easily sent abroad. Perhaps that is behind the growing obsession with celebrity, although the supply of jobs for celebrities must be somewhat limited.

In fact outsourcing hasn't always been successful. It has been increasingly obvious that doing it successfully requires skilled management of contracts. Now we have to wonder how we will cope in the future if there is no career path that provides the acquisition of those skills.

There is one interesting growth area that seems to have solid prospects - criminal IT. Scams are yielding good pickings for less personal risk than old-fashioned crimes like bank robbery.

As a result, it seems that criminal groups are picking up practices that were once the province of large companies and sponsoring students for advanced IT studies, with a particular emphasis on security.

But of course the obvious response to all this talk of shortages is to answer that there is no real shortage of talent available to the IT sector. Whenever an article is published on the topic, it brings justifiable comments from people who cannot find work for one reason or another.

Their skills are in the wrong area, they are the wrong age, they are the wrong sex. In fact, many of these people could be easily and quickly trained to fill areas of shortage. Some of them could even provide the training.

Much is said and little is done about the notion of lifetime learning. That is unfortunate, especially in a sector such as IT. Now the government has finally realised that the population is growing older, it has taken fright at the outlook for pensions.

Talk is of a working life that lasts for 50 or more years. But in an area like IT that is clearly impractical without ongoing learning. How much of that needs to be in formal educational institutions is unclear but it would be reasonable to assume that people will need a range of possibilities.

For many people, learning related to an active career is a much more motivating prospect than training in a purely academic environment. University studies are rewarding in themselves if the subject is interesting and intellectually stimulating.

But practical skills, computer programming for instance, are much more easily learned when there is a real-life problem to be solved.

It is therefore a pity the government pushes educational institutions to teach vocational subjects to young people. Students going straight from school to university have only vague ideas about career prospects, demonstrated by the gross mismatches between numbers of students and work availability in subjects such as journalism.

As years go by, experience gives people a far greater insight into their career prospects and training needs but the opportunities are greatly reduced. This needs to change.

To some extent, employers inevitably connive with the misguided policy of promoting vocational training, in the hopes of offloading costs to the state. But their demands are confused and confusing.

One minute the complaint is of a lack of skills relevant to specific occupations and the next minute the complaint is about a perceived lack of basic educational attainment.

So is there a problem? If there is, it is not the one that is usually cited - the skills shortage. Really, it is the lack of clear thinking about the aims and possibilities for education.

It is about the inflexibility of what should be interlinked structures of career and education. And it is about the failure to take advantage of the substantial pools of talent that do not fit into stereotypes.