SBA

The Skills Gap

A few weeks ago I wrote about the perceived skills shortage and promised that another article would talk about the technology skills in which we fall short on the island, so this is it. I’ve also just been asked to write a related article on technology skills and recruitment for BCS The Chartered Institute for IT, so by the time I finish I’ll have had enough of wittering on about skills for a while.

In my recent article about the skills shortage I identified that the ICT sector encompasses a huge diversity of technology skills, and that we are commonly far too prescriptive in what we demand as employers  thereby exacerbating the skills shortage by creating an artificial skills gap. Nevertheless, both skills shortage and skills gap are real and have serious implications for the island.

There are many ways of slicing the IT pie, and I’m going to crudely cut four slices: Commercial Software, Corporate IT,  Internet Services and Embedded Technology. Apologies to all the technologists who recognise that I should break things down further, but these articles are intended for a business audience; and apologies to those business people who find technology jargon to be double-dutch but keep reading and you’ll get the point, this article is ultimately about money.

Commercial Software: These are the software products which you buy to run on your desktop, server or mobile. They might be off the shelf like Microsoft Office, or bespoke. If we want to create them in order to sell them we probably want a few specific skills. We’ll probably develop this software to run on Microsoft Windows, Apple OS/X, Android or iOS and the skills we seek will be specific to these platforms. For the most lucrative of these, the Windows platform, C# is the most widely used programming language for commercial programs, followed by Visual Basic (VB). We probably want programmers who have one or both of these languages, combined with knowledge of the dot Net (.Net) framework which gives the programmer a huge library of ready-made shortcuts, and very often we’ll want knowledge of the Microsoft SQL Server database. With these skills we can develop Windows software as a business, without we can’t. On island company PDMS is a great example of using these technologies to develop software as a business, without access to these skills its growth would be strangled. The core languages for developing on both OS/X and iOS are Objective-C and Swift, whilst for Android majors on Java, but we have relatively few developers creating Apple or Android software  on the island.

Corporate IT: The majority of corporate IT also exists on the Microsoft platform. In large corporates there are significant exceptions but of course large corporates are a minority and only a few are represented on the island. The majority of IoM companies therefore need Microsoft Windows Server skills, Microsoft SQL Server database skills, and for those which develop their own software C#, Visual Basic and dot Net. Anecdotal evidence and recruitment adverts suggest that there is a shortage of C# programmers in particular - there is a good population of these on the island but insufficient for our needs. The few corporates using IBM iSeries systems, Oracle databases or Java seem to really struggle when recruiting.

Internet Services: The Internet is very different, instead of running on your computer Internet services are usually running on the service provider’s computers or in the cloud, so the problems faced by Internet technologists are generally of a different scale - instead of systems maybe used by a few hundred users Internet developers often have to create systems that will work for a few hundred thousand or a few million users, so they use different technologies.  The Internet largely runs on free open source software, particularly Linux platforms. It uses different databases, typically MySQL, PostgreSQL and Hadoop, and different programming languages, in particular C, C++, PHP, Python (and Django), Ruby, R and Java along with HTML, Javascript and CSS. The key things to note are that these technologies are very different to those used in corporate IT and much commercial software, and need to be to achieve the scale, reliability and agility demanded of Internet services. Anecdotal evidence, recruitment adverts and corporate presence suggest we have few people with these skills on island.

Embedded Technology: This is the software running in your oven, washing machine, electric toothbrush or electricity meter - it’s very common, and often invisible because most embedded computers don’t have a screen and keyboard. The key languages are C, C++ and Assembler, and the platform will either be esoteric or non-existent - most embedded technology applications don’t use an operating system. When embedded systems talk to the Internet we call it the “Internet of Things”. The key attribute of the embedded systems programmer is that unlike most IT people he is required to understand the computer as an electronics engineer. I have never seen a job on the island for an embedded systems programmer, we have a few hobbyists but very little commercial demand for these skills.

You’ve probably noticed that we give programming languages pretty meaningless names. C is one of the grand-daddies of programming languages - it came after B; C# and C++ are named in homage. Python is named after Monty Python, Django is named after a famous Jazz musician. Anyway, the top ten most popular programming languages in 2015 are, according to the IEEE, in descending order C, C++, and Java roughly tied for first place, Python, C#, R, PHP, Javascript, Ruby and Matlab. Such lists are always debatable - what does popular mean? - but nevertheless indicative.

What this says is that the most prevalent programming language used on the IoM, C# and the Microsoft platforms that support it, comes in 5th place, and the second, Visual Basic, doesn’t even make the top ten. The rest of the world is more concerned with the development of Internet Services and Embedded Technology - that’s where the action and money is. In order to grow our ICT economy we need skills in Internet technology, mobile apps, embedded technology, and the “Internet of Things”.

(As a brief aside, there is no reason why corporates should not adopt Internet technology to substantially replace their Microsoft-centric IT. Some do; one can argue that the more modern technologies used in the Internet are cheaper, more productive, more powerful and more reliable, but changing from what you know to something new is always difficult.)

So to build the ICT sector in the island we need to up-skill / re-skill. Whilst there is a shortage of Microsoft skills there are many Microsoft professionals on the island and the shortage looks more like corporate employers competing for the cream than a fundamental lack of capacity. The problem lies in growth, the primary ICT growth areas are in Internet Services, Internet of Things, and Mobile Apps - we need more of these and we have the chicken and egg problem, which comes first, skills or demand.

Startup and early-stage ICT companies need skills but don’t have the resources to do much training, so these are probably not the answer. Large employers coming to the island will train a workforce as the finance, insurance and e-gaming sectors have demonstrated, but seducing them is difficult particularly as the ICT sector offers few opportunities to create regulatory advantage - improved Data Protection legislation is the only real hope for this.

I think there are three big levers we can use to create and demonstrate the skills needed both to attract more ICT employers to the island and to stimulate more home-grown offerings. One is that Government as the largest consumer of ICT and the only big ICT user owned by the public should, where appropriate and especially as it attempts to create more digital services, specify that new bespoke systems should be developed on-island using common Internet technologies thus creating a demand and justification for local ICT providers to improve their skills in these areas. The second is that a coalition of agencies including Government, MICTA and BCS should create one or more public benefit open source projects to be created using Internet, Apps and Internet of Things technologies and fund the platforms so that Isle of Man developers can get the opportunity to learn, practice and evidence these skills in return for their free labour in creating the projects. Such projects could include real-time bus information, traffic and pollution monitoring, a comprehensive Manx e-shopping portal - I’m sure other people will have many better ideas. The third lever is to inform our education system and youngsters looking to work in technology that in future our ICT education should focus more on Internet and Embedded technologies, with less than half of the practical curriculum being devoted to Microsoft - learning to use more relevant technologies in ICT and Computer Science classes will help to encourage the diversity of skills we need for the future.

That’s it, I’m fresh out of bright ideas. Whilst we try to create the ICT sector growth envisaged in Vision 2020 the rest of the world is pulling ahead using technology skills that are scarce here. I apologise for suggesting that Government intervention is needed but China, India, Russia, Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia, Cuba, the USA, France, Germany, Iceland, and Spain have each adopted programmes to move substantive parts of their public sectors to Linux and Internet technology platforms thereby broadening their ICT skills and saving money. Perhaps we need to follow their examples.