The UK's real missing skill: Imagination
Published: 06 Jul 2006 13:10 BST
Another day, another warning about an IT skills crisis in the UK. This time it's the British Computer Society (BCS) and Lancaster University crying foul over the decline of the local software industry with the usual suspects in the frame: a lack of young people studying computer science, the spectre of off-shoring, and lack of tech professionals with business skills.
Ironically, while decrying the poor image that IT has in wider society as a home of the socially inept, the BCS representative Elizabeth Sparrow, speaking at an event to publicise the survey, chose to use exactly the kind of language that continues to propagate the tech industry's perception issues. She described the need for some "expert nerds" while calling for more tech workers with wider skills. Names may not break bones, but bandying about terms such as "nerd" and "geek" at an event designed to address IT's image problem and lack of talent seems needlessly clumsy.
Another problem cited by Matt Bishop, senior director of Microsoft's Developer Platform Group, which sponsored the survey, is that apparently: "Young people no longer regard software as cool". Mr Bishop is right up to a point, but wrong to assume that software has ever been seen as hip or trendy by a mainstream of young people. It is not software that has lost its sheen of cool — it never had any one — it's Microsoft. The software giant enjoyed a certain kudos as an employer during its peak years in the early to mid-1990s, but is increasingly out of touch when it comes to young talent.
Not so it seems with Google, which last week brought its successful Code Jam programming competition/recruitment drive to Europe. More than 9,000 programmers entered the competition and were eventually whittled down to 50 finalists, who battled it out in Dublin for a share of prize money and potential jobs at the search giant. Interestingly, the vast majority of the Code Jam finalists were from Eastern Europe, with the top three winners hailing from Poland and Russia. The UK managed to turn out just two finalists compared to 11 from Poland.
What the UK is suffering from is not a lack of IT skills but an unwillingness to accept our new position in the global economy. Harking back to some golden age of UK engineering talent is indulgent and misguided. Just as Microsoft has lost touch with its environment and suffered as a result, so some figures in the UK tech industry have lost sight of what we should be striving to offer.
Playing tactically and discretely in lucrative niches — witness the booming UK games industry — while turning out the kind of tech managers who understand business and can be recruited into senior positions in foreign companies, seems a more realistic future. The real crisis in the UK IT industry could be a lack of imagination.
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