The IT industry is furiously fast paced – accounting for an ever more significant driving force behind many a business’s bottom line. For those companies that harness the right technology and employ the most talented of IT workers there exists a bright future propelled through innovation. Yet it seems that the UK is seriously suffering from the side effects of being dangerously understaffed when it comes to the IT industry. So here we take a look at just what this means for the jobs market for forward thinking businesses, as well as for the wider UK economy as a whole.
The all-together rather gloomy UK graduate jobs market
For graduates it seems that there is barely a day that goes by that doesn’t report ever more depressing figures. From the fact that more than 50% of graduates are working within non-graduate jobs (CIPD 2015) through to the fact that every graduate position has, on average, 39 applicants (High Fliers 2014).
Add to this the typical student debt bill, which has sky rocketed to £44,000 (The Independent 2014) and you’d be forgiven for thinking that UK Graduates have never had it so bad.
The IT Graduate: Seriously hot property for the trading landscape of tomorrow
For the IT graduate the outlook is positively glorious, and is far from reflective of the seriously saturated market that many other industries are suffering from.
Rather than there being 39 applicants for each IT position, there is instead 39% of UK companies struggling to fulfil their IT needs (BCS 2013) and with the current needs of UK businesses, as reported by E-Skills, requiring around 140,000 IT professionals each year, the current rate of 16,440 students enrolling upon computer science courses is woefully inadequate.
Of course this all contrasts against a backdrop of an ever more digitalised UK world, within which the IT industry is forecasted to expand five times over within the next ten years (CIO 2015). Companies today are then truly built upon solid social media strategies, ever evolving business apps and software that makes for the basis upon which businesses operate, market themselves and grow.
The outlook for the average UK business
As employers struggle to secure domestic IT workers, particularly within the software development realm, such businesses are turning to offshore positions within developing economies. Yet these companies are finding such an approach to be a seriously false economy where language, cultural and educational differences prove many a time to be insurmountable barriers.
A forecast for the UK economy
A little shining light for the UK IT jobs market comes in the form of recently announced plans by the Government to introduce core computing skills, such as coding, from Primary school age. However, for the time being, or rather the decade or so until these tiny, well trained coding digits enter the jobs market, it seems that UK employers may need to look to overseas graduates to fulfil their essential IT needs.
Langley James appreciate the challenges of today’s businesses in their quest to fulfil tomorrow’s IT positions today, going beyond the status quo to deliver superstar candidates for even the most demanding of IT job roles.
