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There is one subject that is guaranteed to get a ‘full postbag’ here at TechMarketView. That’s all aspects of offshoring and, in particular, the use of the visa system to bring relatively low-paid/low-skilled IT staff into the UK.
Today, the Works and Pension Secretary, Ian Duncan Smith, will ‘strongly criticise’ Government’s immigration record. See BBC News – UK firms urged to hire UK jobless not foreign workers. “We know that a significant proportion of those coming into the UK purporting to be high-skilled workers have actually been doing low-skilled jobs once in the UK”. Government adviser, Frank Field reckons that an amazing 87% of the 400,000 newly created jobs in the UK went to immigrants.
Let’s start by making one thing clear. I am totally in favour of really highly skilled IT staff and technology entrepreneurs being able to come to work in the UK. Indeed, encouraging the setting up of tech businesses in the UK not only greatly assists our economy but creates huge numbers of lower paid/skilled jobs here.
The problem is at the lower end – in IT and more widely. We have an appalling record of youth employment – as my work with the Prince’s Trust demonstrates to me on a daily basis. Not everyone can be a brain surgeon. We need jobs for the kind of kids who used to work in the fields, down the mines and in the factories 50 years ago. These jobs, where available, should go to our own youngsters.
The real problem arises for IT entry level staff. Here the situation is far from clear. IT graduates have the worst employment prospects of any other discipline. Many blame the Indian players for taking on huge numbers of graduates in India and using them (either in India or by using the UK visa system) for UK IT work. Hardly any UK graduates are taken on by Indian players – even though the UK is their biggest single market outside the US.
But, as Stephen Leonard, IBM UK’s CEO, said yesterday (see Telegraph IBM boss says skills gap leaves 200 jobs empty) IBM “created about 1,000 new technology, analyst and consulting jobs across the UK over the past year but has only been able to fill 80pc of them because there are too few quality candidates coming through the system.” “Lacklustre GCSE curriculum is partly to blame”. Karen Price, CEO at eSkills blamed the way IT is taught in schools, saying that the Key Stage 4 (GCSE) syllabus was having "more negative than positive impact" because it put too much emphasis on IT literacy and not enough on understanding how technology actually works. Interquest, a technology recruitment agency, said it has spent the past three months trying to fill 50 graduate trainee roles but has only filled five because too many young people were taking "Mickey Mouse" degrees.
We hear these points over and over again. The Indian offshorers who have tried to recruit UK graduates all report really appalling results. Not just basic skills but also attitude. Several told us that these graduates refused to move to different locations – in the UK or abroad. Something that is a prerequisite in our industry as many readers will know.
We need to solve this issue. We do need the entry level jobs created in the UK to go to UK young people. But we need the system to create young people qualified in all the skills and motivated to take up the opportunities.
