I was quoted earlier this week in the Henry Mance’s FT article Growth in IT jobs confounds offshore fears. It was occasioned because of ONS figures showing a 11% yoy rise, to 720,000, in the number of people working in IT jobs in the UK. ‘More jobs in computer programming, consultancy and related services have been added in the past year than in the six years to Dec 2007’.
I made the point to Mance – as indeed I have done for the last decade to anyone that would listen – that in the 1990s (and before) IT companies in the UK created a large number of entry level jobs (school leavers as well as graduates). But this recruitment ‘dropped off a cliff’ post Y2K. There were many reasons but the most significant, in my opinion, was the rapid growth in offshoring. Indeed practically all the entry level jobs in IT were created in India. Those people, even those with practically no real experience, were then used on UK projects – whether undertaken onshore or offshore – by both the Indian players and other SI’s with significant offshore presence.
I am a huge supporter of allowing highly skilled IT professionals to come to the UK where such skills do not exist here. However, we will never get those homegrown ‘highly skilled IT professionals’ unless we give them entry level jobs and train them. As I have said countless times‘IT professionals do not come fully formed from the womb’.
But, in the last year or so, the message really does seem to have got through. We have written several times recently about the surge in Apprenticeships in IT in the UK. Indeed we were delighted this week to read from e-skills that another 1,000 new IT apprenticeship vacancies were being created by ‘Atos, BT, Capgemini, Fujitsu, IBM and dozens of smaller companies.’ Even as I write this post, an email arrived from Lawrence Jones, the CEO of UKFast, announcing a £4.5m investment in taking on 50 graduates in Manchester this year and next. Yet more fantastic news.
The Indian offshore players, who make such a large part of their revenues from the UK, need to do much more in creating entry level IT jobs in the UK. There are some small examples but most players merely stress the number of UK employees they have – most of which have been taken on under TUPE arrangements.
But, as I said in the FT article, ‘We’ve turned a corner’. The more entry level jobs we create, the more youngsters will want to do IT at school or college. Then the more IT entrepreneurs we will create.