Britain faces 'crisis' in IT skills

By Steve Malone

Posted on 1 Nov 2004 at 14:44

Britain faces a skills crunch that will seriously affect the country's competitiveness in ten years' time according to the report published today. According to a survey undertaken by e-skills and Gartner, the UK is creating only a fraction of the IT professionals it needs to stay ahead in the global marketplace.

According to the report, the country needs between 156,00 and 179,000 people with IT skills to enter the workforce every year. According to e-skill, potential new entrants to IT include 8,300 graduates, but only 3,700 will be IT graduates.

The IT skills gap is already having a serious effect on British business. An inability to recruit suitable IT professionals has meant that 76 per cent of companies looking for staff have had to delay projects. As a result, 22 per cent of these companies have reported losing orders to competitors.

More worrying, the lack of IT skills is not just the familiar problem of finding developers but also basic office IT skills such as word processing or spreadsheets. Over a quarter of businesses say that over a third of their employees lacked everyday IT skills.

Karen Price, the UK CEO of e-skills said 'The survey clearly demonstrates that the UK will not be competitive in the global economy in 10 years time if we continue with the level and type of skills being relied on by business today. We have neither the everyday IT user skills, nor the IT professional skills within our businesses to avoid an economic crisis'.

e-skills UK is an employers organisation which is licensed by government as the Sector Skills Council for IT, Telecoms and Contact Centres.