Microsoft Architect Insight Conference

Skills & Education Clinic

The current thinking is that Higher Education is generally providing a rich set of courses and according to the latest UCAS figures HE acceptances are up and at a record high. It seems that the challenges that are really there are in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) and Computing courses at Secondary School (from key stage 2 onwards) and thus the pull through to HE is lower. The subjects are seen as dry/boring/too difficult and there are better paid jobs elsewhere (Medicine, Law etc.).

Therefore, a large potential of students are being missed and it is nothing to do with numbers falling off into HE and the questions is therefore, what can be done to reverse this trend?

The second issue that is surfacing is the weak link between universities and industry that stifles software innovation from working in a connected way. The government too is interested in this area and wants industry to deal with the increasing skilling issues including aging population, rapidly changing work landscape and so on. This has implications for business large and small and raises the question of what is and what should the industry be doing to reduce this skills issue?

 Notes

 1.       Lack of formal Qualifications 

• It’s not about IT Qualifications
• It’s about other subjects
• How do we make these subjects more interesting?
• They need to be more fun
• We need to take a few more risks 
• We need to value teachers
• a vicious circle
• Parental influence
• More public funded projects
• Need to teach team working and collaboration skills
• Plagiarism

2.       How do we maintain inspiration?

How do you know if you are able to think?

• More use of Gap years
• Constant rate of change
• Balance between “Black box” implementers and composers 

3.       IT covers a huge range of disciplines  

• Software Development poorly served by Engineering metaphor
• More like advertising agencies?
• Creative
• Male-dominated
• People skills very important

4.       Education – shift in emphasis to Money/Cash  

• Ie focus on paying back of loans
• Emphasis on conformity not excellence
• Industry – short term approach to finances
• Offshoring etc.
• The degree one does is not that relevant
• More required on people skills
• Industry skills -> IT
• Funding
• Real world experience
• Problem Solving
• Accreditation
• But can you apply what you know
• Incentivise industry to engage with people in education

5.       Not enough training

• Need to educate people in breadth and depth of opportunities
• Incentivise Industry – tax breaks

6.       Image problem  

• Unclear career paths
• We advertise our failures
• Gap in technology being taught
• Put motivational individuals in front of your people
• PR Job required – need to do better
• School/uni syllabuses
• Research – better role for universities feeding into what companies are doing