SBA

The Skills Shortage

We keep hearing that there is a major skills shortage in ICT, and it is true. A 2014 study suggests that the UK will need an additional 750,000 ICT workers by 2017, and ICT employment is growing five times faster than the wider UK economy. Recent estimates suggest that over a quarter of all growth in London is within the tech sector.

These are frightening figures, without an adequate supply of tech skills British economic growth will be strangled. The prospect of growing the ICT workforce by 250,000 workers a year is incredible, the UK produces ten thousand or so ICT graduates each year, even India only produces a hundred thousand. But is the problem as clear cut as it seems?

The sad reality is that about half of UK Computer Science graduates do not end up working in technology, despite employers apparently crying out for tech skills.  The UK recruits many technologists from abroad, for example from India, whilst not employing its own graduates in the profession for which they have trained. It is self-evident that whilst the supply of technology workers may appear to fall short of economic need, there is far more to the problem than simply a shortage. When there is a shortage of bread people clear the supermarket of both white and brown loaves, they don’t leave half the stock on the shelves.

In many respects the ICT skills problem is about a gap rather than a shortage. The possible range of technology skills in ICT is incredibly diverse, and it is normal that an employer will need a combination of technologies meaning that the likelihood of finding a candidate with the desired skillset can be very low. In some employers, although they often don’t recognise it themselves, the combination of technologies required is unique to them - they will probably never find the “ideal” candidate however hard they try. It is not surprising then that many employers express frustration about the “IT skills shortage”, in demanding specific combinations of technologies they make recruitment success improbable. This diversity gap extends beyond individual employers to affect both local geographies, and industries.

Corporate IT, and the commercial software houses supporting it, are primarily “Microsoft shops”. Much corporate software is developed using Microsoft tools to run on MS Windows servers and desktops, supplemented by a huge range of third-party tools and technologies designed to co-exist with the Microsoft ecosystem.

Much of the rest of IT does not use Microsoft technologies.  For example the Internet is a hotch potch of Unix-like technologies including various flavours of Linux, Unix and BSD. Developing for each of these is similar, often source code is portable between them and the programming languages and supplemental technologies are largely different to those used for Microsoft developments. The Apple OS/X and iOS environments are also Unix/Linux based, as are Android and Chrome, and again they prefer different programming languages. The “Internet of Things” similarly prefers different languages and technologies.

It all adds up to a huge diversity of tools. The underlying skills of the developer remain the same, a good programmer is a good programmer, similarly a good database administrator or systems architect or user experience designer are good irrespective of the tools used, but the tendency of recruiters and employers to require specific combinations of tools to avoid the overhead of a learning curve means that excellent highly skilled computing professionals are regularly overlooked because they have not used the “right” toolset. This gross stupidity is perpetuated throughout ICT recruitment, stupidity in that it is akin to rejecting the best chauffeur because his experience is primarily driving a Cadillac instead of a Mercedes-Benz. OK, the tools we use in IT are more complex to learn, but because they evolve and change so frequently the ability to learn new tools is one of the hallmarks of the good IT professional.

The result is that when you specify a need for a programmer with experience of C#, .Net, SSL, R, Go and Bigtable to work on your Google-hosted big data analysis system for Windows PCs you’re going to struggle a bit. You will need access to a really big pool of developers to find one with the right combination - they may be one in a hundred thousand.

Here in the Isle of Man we don’t have a hundred thousand developers, we don’t even have ten thousand, we might have a thousand, and maybe a couple of thousand more IT operations people who keep the diverse IT systems in our businesses running - so our “skills gap” is far more pronounced than in the UK or the USA. By persisting in recruiting for specific technologies we frequently condemn ourselves to looking in bigger skills pools overseas, just as the UK does but more so, whilst bypassing local talent.

Looking abroad for skills is of course entirely valid:- because systems development is very often project based rather than ongoing we may only want the desired skills for a few months to supplement our current project, but it makes far less sense for long term requirements. When we want people to operate and maintain our systems we generally want them for the long haul, we need them and their families to be happy here not yearning to return to the bright lights of the big city. Recruiting in IT for the long haul means being prepared to train, to bring people up the learning curve for the technologies we use in our organisations. In Huddersfield or Halifax one can easily recruit people living in Leeds, Manchester or Sheffield and they can continue living there amongst friends and family, on the Isle of Man we cannot. We must solve our own skills gap and rely on the underlying disciplinary knowledge; a good programmer can learn new languages easily, similarly a good systems administrator has little trouble transferring from Linux to Windows Server or vice versa.

Project based work is different. A project necessarily has a finite timeline and we want people who can join us for a few months or a year or two and who hit the ground running - this is where looking off-island makes sense, not only in the UK but in Europe, America and Asia. There is a large and readily available pool of such people, highly skilled, highly paid, who expect to work on a finite short-term basis as hired guns, going where they are needed and taking the risk of unemployment between assignments or as they pause to re-skill. In the IT business we refer to them as “contractors” and historically the island has made extensive use of contractors, necessarily because of the small size of our own skills pool. If we aspire to further grow our e-economy as outlined in Vision 2020 then we will continue to need contractors in increasing numbers as our e-business projects ramp up, and they will come to our little island knowing full well that they’re not making a lifetime commitment - they’ll probably be here for something between six months and two years.

Unfortunately we’ve shot ourselves in both feet; a couple of years ago Tynwald passed legislation attacking the abuse of tax avoidance through the use of Personal Service Companies (“PSCs”, basically one-man companies) to avoid direct permanent employment and the associated ITIP and NI obligations. Because they are short term resources, typically working on assignments which last between six months and a couple of years, this is precisely how most IT contractors operate. Oddly, because the island is generally seen as a low tax jurisdiction, the Isle of Man’s anti-PSC legislation is possibly the toughest in the western world, attempting to treat these itinerant experts exactly as though they had low-risk permanent employment with the result that the availability of contractors to come and work in the Isle of Man has diminished massively, because just about every other first world country is more economically attractive to them and sympathetic to the risks they take.

In summary, whilst there may be an ICT skills shortage, the real problem is the skills gap, the mismatch between available skills in the market and the changing demands of specific employers as technology moves on. If we are to compete with the UK and benefit from the ICT growth envisaged in Vision 2020 and being achieved elsewhere, then as a society we need to grasp the nettle and be more flexible in employing good professionals with strong underlying skills for our permanent roles, and support them in taking on the specific technologies we need for today and tomorrow. When it comes to the shorter-term need for additional and specific skills to build new systems we need to recognise and turn to the flexible labour market, and that means addressing our competitiveness as a destination of choice for contractors. At the moment faced with a choice most UK IT contractors prepared to move away from home will have Brazil, Norway, Switzerland and the Netherlands at the top of their desirable destinations - due to our PSC legislation the Isle of Man won’t even feature in the top 50.

When I started out to write this article I had intended to cover some of the specific technology skills in which we fall short, but explaining the underlying causes seemed more important so I’ll return to that theme in another article.