Can education really fill the e-skill gap? The government's scheme to resolve what it says is an urgent crisis of IT skills seems to have put a few

The government's scheme to resolve what it says is an urgent crisis of IT skills seems to have put a few commercial training providers' noses out of joint. Mark Ballard investigates why trainers feel that they have been treated as an afterthought.

Government agency e-Skills UK is trying to ensure that employers are provided with adequate sources of training and a reliable source of technically savvy new recruits.

The agency embarked on its mission under the assumption that the issue of skills needed to be addressed to prevent the bottom falling out of Britain’s economy. It has done this, said its chairman Larry Hirst (who is also chief executive of IBM UK), by conducting an “unprecedented collaboration” of educators, employers and industry.

Yet by the time e-Skills published the premise of its strategy in a report, IT Insights, last November, it had only just got round to consulting with the private training industry about its plans – and even then only online.

Trainers are still at a loss to explain why they where treated as an afterthought. Brian Sutton, director of learning at trading firm QA, said that industry consultation was sought too late in the day for its views to be adequately represented.

To rub salt into the wound, IT Insights’ detailed analysis made only brief reference to commercial trainers, yet still managed to suggest they were not up to the challenge of meeting the changing needs of employers.

“The sheer scale of the task, developing the skills of more than 20 million workers, makes it clear that traditional approaches to developing IT skills are neither an economic nor practical means of addressing the challenge,” Larry Hirst wrote in his introduction to the report.

Elsewhere in the report, observations were made with no explanation of their relevance. Private provision was “highly polarised across the UK”, with more private trainers working in London that Wales or Scotland. Presumably, e-Skills thought it should find ways to increase the numbers of trainers in areas of lower demand for their services.

The phrase “The private training industry alone will be unable to deliver the necessary IT skills development needed in the UK” was repeated no less than four times in the report.

Yet e-Skills provided no explanation of why traditional means were not up to the job or why trainers were inadequate to the task.

“We felt that in the context of the report, the commercial training industry was not well represented,” said Sutton, “And it was not given credit for the role it plays.”

The same was true in the Sector Skills Agreement, the action plane-Skills negotiated with all “stakeholders” in IT skills and published last month.

“The absence of any mention of the commercial sector in the Sector Skills Agreement is striking,” said David Pardo, research director of IT Skills Research and a respected voice in the industry. “It is the only sector that trains Britain’s IT workforce.”

e-Skills has given CRN the same explanation for this view of the

commercial sector as it gave the trainers themselves – none. But the Sector Skills Agreement and the constituents of the e-Skills board provide food for active imaginations. The agreement concerns itself primarily with improving IT education in schools, colleges and universities.

e-Skills’ ideas won encouragement from the employers who dominate the agency’s board. It cannot have been difficult to get employers to agree a scheme to put more public money into IT education so they might reduce some of the £400m they spend with private trainers.

This conspiracy is met with gleeful recognition by trainers, but is unfair on e-Skills. The agency has its work cut out. As one source close to e-Skills told CRN: “E-Skills are covering such an incredibly wide range, from basic IT literacy to schools to professional skills. They are trying to boil the ocean.”

Even in limiting its action plan to education, e-Skills looks ambitious. It wants to bring order to the plethora of existing schemes and qualifications by introducing a wealth of other schemes, most of which are dependent on as yet unapproved Department for Education and Skills funding.

Its efforts are widely commended. It wants to bring order, for example, to the 600 or so existing IT user qualifications so employers can make sense of them. It is proposing a scheme called Computer Clubs for Girls (CC4G) to address gender imbalance among IT professionals. It wants to make academic qualifications more relevant to employers, bring about widespread improvements in basic IT literacy and open the eyes of small businessmen to the potential for IT to transform their firms.

It has gained commitments from employers to support its plans. But with so many schemes and many more acronyms, e-Skills has a problem in communicating what it is doing, let alone actually getting it done.

e-Skills’ token references to the commercial sector give trainers the impression that it is only capable of tackling education.

“The private training industry seems to be out of the loop. I can only imagine that people formulating policy in these areas think with a public [sector] education hat on,” said Adrian Hall, business development manager at training provider Interquad.

Sutton said the agency is working with its heritage. “They might have a sexy new vision, but one is trapped by one’s history. It determines where they look for evidence, for advice and solutions – we all do that.”

E-skills’ most interesting plan for education is to match provision with the demands of employers and methods of government funding. Its proposals for ongoing development of IT skills – the domain of the private trainer – suggest a need for more consultation.

The agency thinks there is a need for a “new IT skills development infrastructure” using delivery methods that “take into account the impracticality of releasing employees from work” and involve that “unprecedented collaboration” mentioned earlier.

Yet private training is not only the most important means of training IT workers, but also arguably the most effective. Calculations presented by Experian in the IT Insights report describe a need for 179,000 new entrants into the IT workforce every year for the next decade, but graduates entering the industry numbered (by the last count in 2002), just 8,800.

David Flint, a vice president of research at Gartner, which contributed to IT Insights, said that to focus on a mythological skills gap is to miss the point.

“There is a development problem and that is not that we don’t have enough skilled people, but that the people in the IT industry don’t have quite the right skills,” said Flint. This view is echoed in part by people in the training industry, who are the primary providers of skills development.

Nigel Pearson, director of Azlan Professional Services, points out that the strains the training industry has been under for the past five years, with widespread losses and closures, put paid to any idea of a skills crisis.

The oversupply of training provision is demonstrated in Pardo’s research, which shows a fall in training industry revenues from £525m in 2000 to £400m in 2004.

Yet skills development is still pressing for a number of reasons. There is a greater need for business technologists – those technically experienced people who can also manage things and deal with people – that has been described often as a reason for so many high-profile IT disasters.

The offshore outsourcing trend is expected to exacerbate the problem because by shipping technical jobs overseas you remove a feed of competent technicians into management jobs and create a need for more of those jobs to manage overseas technicians.

Consequently, there is a rapidly growing need for training in methodologies such as PRINCE 2 and ITIL. Six Sigma, the GE process methodology that is infecting services sectors after creating a buzz in manufacturing, is also being bandied around by organisations such as Forrester Research as a solution to the now widely recognised problem of managing large IT projects.

Yet private providers are meeting this emerging demand. Pearson said he has been offering PRINCE 2 training for two years and that it already provides five per cent of his revenue. “The profit affect is quite a good divining rod,” he said.

Melvyn Burton, a skills strategist with utility group RWE, which employs 700 IT professionals in the UK, says he relies mainly on commercial trainers to develop his staff, not least because they are always “ahead of the game” in providing courses to meet emerging demand.

The areas in which trainers report the fastest growth – such as security and project management – are the same areas that e-Skills said suffer a shortage of skills.

“We all know how long it takes for academic institutions to adapt,” said one training expert who did not want to be named. “We can have a committee sitting about a table today designing the practical syllabus, but in three years’ time when the graduates come out of university those skills won’t be the ones in demand and some of them will probably be useless.”

This focus on education is the reason trainers are sceptical of e-Skills’ plans. They don’t believe the education sector can deliver the “oven ready” professionals that employers want. Forging better links between employers and education institutions can only help, however, and e-Skills’ stated intention of matching public provision to private demand is the right way to go about it.

Also in e-Skills’ defence, its Sector Skills Agreement is intended as a first stab at an evolving project. The agreement itself will be revised. E-Skills did not find time to explain itself, so we can only guess, generously, that it picked the low-hanging fruit first.

If it decides to take a more considered look at private trainers when it has dealt with education, they are not likely to turn their noses up. Meantime, they will continue to be the unsung heroes of training, adapting rapidly to market demand and expanding and contracting with the cycles of the industry.

Much of what e-Skills is doing in education will have consequences for trainers, however, such as its plan to introduce an over-arching structure for IT qualifications. Trainers are sceptical of this.

They would like to have more of a say in how these plans evolve. They might also have an important contribution to make in improving the IT education sector.

Yet in representing the views of employers, as per its remit, e-Skills has been pushed to deal with the area with which it has least satisfaction.