How to close the digital skills gap
Monday 5th June saw the digital skills summit, Closing the Gap, take place at the Houses of Parliament. Hosted by the Parliament Street think tank and Centropy PR, the event brought together a panel of technology industry leaders to discuss the challenges posed by AI, the role of education in equipping young people with digital skills and how to increase diversity in the UK’s talent pipeline. Among them was Natalie Whittlesey, director of InX.
Skills, not digital skills
There was a widespread feeling that digital skills are now involved in everything. There’s hardly a role in an organisation that isn’t touched by digital in one way or another. As it becomes more embedded in everything we do, digital is also becoming as much a mindset as a set of skills – a mindset of being adaptable and dealing with uncertainty. Young people are increasingly utilising it as part of their problem solving. In fact, digital skills are critical not just for individual success, but also for innovation. They have become the lifeblood of progress.
Yet there aren’t enough people in the tech industry with the digital skills we need. Our recent A View from the Top survey of senior business and tech leaders revealed that professionals skilled in data/analytics were the most sought after, selected by 51% of respondents.
With whole pools of underutilised talent that could make a big difference, how do we inspire social mobility in tech to close that gap not just in the short term but in the long term? That comes from fostering an environment of innovation and inclusion, empowering people from underrepresented groups to take part in the digital world.
“You can’t change things without a bit of investment,” said Natalie. “How do you inspire girls, people who are neurodiverse, people from different parts of society? You have to inspire and you have to invest.”
Tech as a tool for personalised learning
Maybe tech is the key to creating that more diverse workforce. We can only widen the tech talent pool by appreciating that there are a variety of learning styles and finding ways of appealing to each. That way, we can tailor our system to suit different people.
AI allows us to teach someone as an individual, catering a programme of learning to their individual learning style. Crucially, it can also help us adapt personalised learning for people with neurodivergences, who can bring entirely new sets of skills and ways of thinking to an organisation. By bringing in more of a personalised learning approach, AI could in turn allow teachers to move to a more foundational approach, focusing on those basic skills that form the basis of learning.
At the same time, we need a change of mindset in our education system. We need to understand that failure is part of learning, and having the freedom to experiment, fail and try again, is crucial to creative thinking. Too many people enter a tech course and are put off by the taxing and extremely pressurised coding exam at the end of it. That’s not how we nurture and utilise the talent that’s out there.
Constantly moving goalposts
Only a matter of months ago, AI was just a buzzword. Now ChatGPT has brought it to the forefront of public consciousness. What will be the next gamechanger?
The speed of change means we’re chasing a moving target. Technology is moving faster than education can keep up. People are starting a university course that’s already several years old. By the time they finish, it will be three or four years older. We’re in a situation where teachers frequently don’t know the technologies they’re teaching as well as their students do. To illustrate this pace of change in the workplace, most jobs senior leaders are hiring for didn’t exist when they came into the workforce.
The challenge is how to embed digital skills across a curriculum which is largely knowledge based. Curriculums have to be built on evidence and established empirical knowledge, but with technology changing constantly, how do we prepare people with the right skills for the workforce? In tech, it’s no longer enough to learn once and be set up for life. Tech is a lifelong learning pathway and we need to constantly top up and adapt our curriculum to set up the next generation of tech professionals.
The link between education and the workplace
While there are many resources available to aid digital learning, we’re not always tapping into them in the most effective way. An inefficient and time-consuming apprenticeships process, with all its associated paperwork, means employers, universities and students aren’t able to utilise apprenticeships as well as they could.
This surely presents an opportunity for private businesses to play more of a role in the education system through mentoring, careers days and other initiatives. Sending industry volunteers into classrooms will inspire and supplement the knowledge of the next generation while giving educators a better understanding of new technologies. There was a feeling that we’re nationally not set up to deliver a lifelong learning pathway, but current efforts to create modular skills acquisition will change the way we’re able to respond to changes in tech.
Perhaps the answer lies in firmly embedding digital into school curriculums early on. “From an early age, teach children technology and digital skills as fundamentally as English, maths and science,” said Natalie.
When the goalposts move, we need to move with them
Hiring processes remain largely the same as they’ve always been, with the result that we’re reaching out to the same pool of people in the same ways and getting the same results. So how can we hope to bring in new talent?
The world is changing, technology is changing and roles are changing, so recruitment processes also need to change. Natalie is a firm believer that in order to close the skills gap, employers need to think differently about the way they bring in talent. “We’re trying to challenge employers not to do the things they’ve always done. Some people are still relying purely on a CV rather than understanding the person.”
There’s still a strong focus on degrees when it comes to hiring for tech roles. But does a degree, based on a fixed curriculum in a subject that changes all the time, really indicate a person’s ability to do a job in tech? Natalie said: “We’re educating employers to think more creatively about how they hire and who they hire. Part of this is challenging organisations about whether someone needs a degree.”
AI the saviour?
Stories about AI are frequently of a cautionary nature, principally centred around the potential loss of jobs. This is hardly surprising when you consider that virtually every new technological advancement has been met with widespread trepidation.
You can certainly understand the concern when it comes to AI. Now we’re not just automating routine tasks, we’re also starting to automate more creative and cerebral vocations. But there’s an argument that AI isn’t taking jobs. It’s creating new jobs, particularly for those who can use AI, and reshaping the concept of human vocation. Ultimately, it’s up to us to decide how long we keep the old jobs that AI can now do for us, and how we use tech to create new roles for ourselves. Who knows what kind of jobs people will be doing five years from now?
To stop digital disappearing into the distance, we need to close the skills gap by getting a greater and more diverse selection of people through advanced education into tech careers. As part of this, we need to encourage social mobility, whether that’s getting more females into STEM subjects or including people from underrepresented segments of society.
This will need to be supplemented by a focus on continuous learning over specific technical skills and a national pathway to meaningful careers. While the rapid rise of AI is seen by many as a threat, we need to utilise it to provide personalised learning and find ways to create new human vocations.
Roles are evolving all the time and in order to evolve with them, the InX team are constantly trying to innovate in the world of executive search so that we can do more than provide the same list over and over again. If you’re looking to hire your next tech leader, to secure your next senior tech role or want to talk to us about the industry, get in touch with our team now.
We’ll be hosting a webinar on Tuesday 27th June discussing the results of our A View from the Top survey, specifically key technology and digital priorities, team working patterns and diversity, and strengths of technology leaders. Please click here if you’d like to join us.