CompTIA fires up skills drive

A new accreditation designed to plug the skills gap and boost IT teaching in the UK has been launched by trade body CompTIA.

Strata is a level-one technical course that will be taught to schoolchildren aged 14 and upwards as well as to mature students.

CompTIA claims existing courses are too vendor specific and focused on individual applications such as Microsoft Excel.

European vice president Matthew Poyiadgi welcomed the government’s recent investment in training young adults, but added: “The government recognises that there is an issue and wants to give people the right skills. There is no shortage of people, but there is a shortage of skills.”

He claimed CompTIA had taken pains to create something that would be of worth to businesses. “Rather than build something academically driven that employers do not recognise, we go straight to the employers,” he said. “They dictate what is needed and this is designed to create the next workforce who will work for the resellers of tomorrow.”

Data from skills council e-Skills reveals that the number of UK students applying for computing courses has dropped off dramatically. In 2001 there were 31,000 applicants but numbers slumped to 15,000 last year. Numbers across the rest of the EU remained steady in that time.

Poyiadgi claimed IT’s waning popularity could be partly due to an image problem. “People associate IT with being geeky and underground and that is something we have got to shake off,” he said.

This view was echoed by Stuart Philip, IT curriculum leader at Highlands College in Jersey, which will be running the Strata course from September. “We see people attracted to the shiny elements but not necessarily to the underlying technology,” he said.

Philip claimed that, in addition to younger students, Strata would be ideal for businesses looking to make staff more technology savvy. “It is about understanding how different devices interact,” he said.

Shaune Parsons, managing director of VAR Computer World Wales, agreed that most school leavers were ill-prepared to start a career in IT. But he said schools were right to focus on Microsoft applications.

“It is difficult to say it is too vendor specific because, in the real world, that is what we face,” he added. “They are aiming to teach general IT at school and that is what they should be doing.”