How to get into IT

The IT sector employs among the highest number of graduates of any sector. It is popular because graduates can work for an IT company or in an IT role at any firm in any industry. It's also an attractive career choice because it allows for flexible working arrangements, regular on-the-job training, and the opportunity to apply skills and knowledge across a range of sectors.

Graduate roles in IT include technical ones such as programming, technical support, web development and software engineering, while business roles also exist. Employers most often welcome applications from graduates with engineering, maths, physics or finance degrees. Graduate training schemes tend to offer training specific to the applications and systems graduates will be using.

GETTING IN

Theresa McHenry, UK HR director, Microsoft

We take about 30 to 40 graduates a year on our training scheme, and also about 100 interns who form a pipeline into the graduate scheme. We don't tend to take many graduates with a pure computer science degree, as we like to take on people from all different backgrounds – and that includes mature graduates.

The scheme isn't rotational. We give graduates a specific role and they will be given responsibility and accountability from day one. From the last four years, we have well over 100 graduates at different levels and positions in the company, and many of the previous graduates will mentor the new ones – we have a good communications network to support and help graduates on our scheme.

We monitor our attrition rate carefully, because graduates are our leadership pipeline for the future. It means we track graduates' progress closely and look after them because the level of knowledge and skills they attain mean they become very marketable, very quickly.

GETTING ON

Richard Nott, CWJobs.co.uk

IT is the fastest growing and most future-proof industry. While this makes it a sensible career choice, IT pros should be mindful that the IT industry will constantly evolve. To stay on top of your game and provide yourself with the best prospects for career development, staying aligned to these emerging trends is crucial. For example, the proliferation of mobile is driving demand for IT professionals with JavaScripts, C#, .NET and HTML5 experience.

As a result, 81% of IT pros surveyed by CWJobs stated that they were planning to "skill up" to compete for roles in mobile – an area on which businesses plan to double their spend in the next six months.

Technological developments aside, IT pros should keep abreast of other factors increasing demand for certain types of skills. Last summer, 80% of IT pros said they planned to skill-up on IT security skills, with a further 45% expecting to see an increase in job opportunities in this discipline.

VIEW FROM THE INSIDE

Vince Sharp, graduate trainee with Waterstons

After completing a Master of Mathematics I joined IT consultancy Waterstons as part of their managed services team. Most of my time has been spent on a service desk, which serves as an escalation point for some clients and as the IT department for others. This has given me the opportunity to tackle all manner of problems, from desktop to enterprise. By retaining ownership of issues and with the support of experienced specialists, I'm continuously developing my technical skills.

I was intimidated by how many applicants had technical backgrounds, but many of the skills learnt studying maths are relevant to my role. While technical expertise is very important in this industry, I believe the ability to relate to your customers and understanding how technology addresses their business needs are equally important.

Source: Mark King, Guardian.co.uk, Friday 4th May 2012

Microsoft: IT Graduate Decline Could Jeopardise UK Jobs

Microsoft’s education director warns the UK of the consequences of a drop in IT A-level students.

Just as many students are finding out their exam results, a worrying trend is developing that could impact British jobs in the future.

The warning came from Steve Beswick, UK director of education for Microsoft, speaking to Computer Weekly.

It seems that what is causing him concern is the decline in numbers of A-level students opting to take IT-related subject.

Microsoft’s Beswick was responding to the 2011 result figures that showed a 1.8 percent decline in the number of students taking IT-related A-levels.

The 1.8 percent decline on the surface seems modest, but dig a little deeper and it seems that five years ago the figures showed that 20,441 A-level students were taking IT courses. This had dropped to just 16,251 in 2010, and in 2011 this fell even further to just 15,962.

This has serious implications for the UK’s IT skill levels going forward.

“The downward trend around computer science numbers is a worrying trend from an IT perspective and a business point of view,” Beswick was quoted as saying by Computer Weekly. He also warned the decline in IT A-levels could lead to increased offshoring of IT jobs.

“IT jobs are growing at four times the rate of the standard jobs market. With fewer people with appropriate IT skills coming out of education, there’ll be no-one to fill the jobs available in the marketplace. We could see more off-shoring to India and China as a result,” Beswick reportedly said.

Beswick apparently believes the IT sector needs to do more work to inspire young people from ages as young as eight years old. But in the meantime businesses could fill IT job vacancies by looking to maths and engineering graduates.

There are well known skills shortages in the IT sector at the moment, especially in the security and mainframe environments.

In July the boss of the UK’s GCHQ complained that his department was losing valuable cyber security experts to the likes of Google, Microsoft and Amazon. And in February e-skills UK revealed that the UK is suffering something of a recruitment crisis, which sees companies struggling to fill an estimated 110,000 new IT jobs created this year.

Meanwhile the Open University recently launched new undergraduate degrees in IT and Computing to help close the UK skills gap. It has also licensed the International Data Group (IDG) CIO Executive Council’s Pathways competency framework earlier this year in order to give potential IT managers a route from IT staff to board level.

Other initiatives are also trying to fill the IT skills gap in the UK.

These include the Cyber Security Challenge, which is now in its second year of operation, and in March CA Technologies announced the creation of its Mainframe Academy to combat the mainframe skills shortage.

Source: Eweekeurope.co.uk, Friday 19th August 2011

A sharper focus for the IT crowd

Computing graduates are dwindling, but two new OU degrees could change that, says Yvonne Cook.

At a time when 83 graduates are chasing each single job vacancy, according to latest figures from the Association of Graduate Recruiters, a recruitment crisis is looming in the UK’s information technology industry. An additional 500,000 workers will be needed in IT and telecommunications over the next five years, according to a report published in January by e-skills UK, the sector skills council for IT. It predicts that jobs in the sector will grow nearly five times faster than the UK average over the next decade.

Yet students and recent graduates – the main source of new talent for the sector – are shunning IT in ever greater numbers, preferring careers in sectors such as financial services and energy. The number of applicants for IT-related higher education courses has dropped by 44 per cent since 2001. In schools, the number of computing A-levels taken has declined by 60 per cent since 2003.

They now constitute just 0.5 per cent of all A-levels sat. Not surprisingly, the age profile of the profession has risen: under-30s made up 33 per cent of IT workers in 2001, but only 19 per cent in 2010. Over the same period the proportion of IT workers aged over 50 almost doubled. As well as representing a missed opportunity for young people, the situation has serious implications for the UK economy. The IT and telecoms industry currently contributes £81 billion per annum to the UK economy, and this is expected to grow.

“The IT and telecoms sector is fundamental to securing private-sector-led economic growth in the years ahead, delivering productivity and global competitiveness, and creating the high-value jobs on which the whole UK economy increasingly depends,” according to the e-skills report Technology Insights 2011.

The report adds: “At current course and speed, the UK will fall behind. Even in the recession, organisations are continuing to report IT and telecoms-related recruitment difficulties and skills gaps both at ‘professional’ and ‘user’ level, and just in the last year, the competitiveness of the UK’s IT industry has dropped from third in the world to sixth.”

The information security industry – where a recent survey by the cyber security network SANS suggested more than 90 per cent of employers are having trouble recruiting – is so worried about the lack of skilled personnel that last year it launched a nationwide competition, the Cyber Security Challenge UK, to try to raise the profile of the information-security profession.

The industry has also been working with the Open University – one of the sponsors of the Cyber Security Challenge – which has a long history of using and teaching IT. In June the OU launched two new part-time undergraduate computing and IT degrees that it has developed in conjunction with e-skills UK and employers in the sector. The open and distance- learning degrees will cater both for new entrants to IT, including career-changers, and existing workers who need to upgrade their skills.

“If we are to secure a healthy pipeline of talent coming into the industry then we need to engage people at all stages in their career in relevant industry learning,” says Mark Ratcliffe, director of higher education engagement at e-skills UK. “As a flexible and adaptable education provider, the Open University is perfectly placed to do this. Its emphasis on work-based learning means younger students with less experience can earn a salary as they study, while more experienced students can earn credits for their existing skills and knowledge.”

The new degrees are more focused on the needs of industry than has been the case in the past, according to Kevin Streater, executive director for IT and telecoms at the Open University. “I was talking to one of the senior technical directors at Hewlett Packard recently, who said he had 300 highly paid jobs he couldn’t fill, because they didn’t have the people applying with the right skills,” says Streater.

“The Open University’s engagement with the industry has highlighted a perceived lack of business acumen among those coming out of education, and an inability to put technical skills to use in a work setting. Our new degrees are designed to tackle these two major issues. There is a joint degree that allows candidates to study IT alongside commercial subjects, improving the business acumen of graduates, as well as a single award that provides students with clear paths to specific IT roles, giving them more specialised skills.”

Students can incorporate courses designed by commercial IT vendors such as Cisco and Microsoft, and work-based learning, as part of their degree, he said. Streater believes that there also need to be changes lower down the education ladder, not just to improve young people’s IT skills, but to give them a clearer understanding of what the subject involves. “Because of the way IT is taught in schools, many people equate it with computer literacy – they think if you can do a PowerPoint presentation and handle spreadsheets, that makes you good at IT. It doesn’t. IT is about how a computer thinks and operates, what data is and how you manage it and get intelligence from it, and turn that into value for business.”

He said the field has developed so rapidly that many teachers have been left behind – as the Department for Education has acknowledged by funding Vital, www.vital.ac.uk, a continuing professional development programme for teachers using IT, which is run by the Open University. One of its aims, says Streater, is to give teachers a better understanding of what business wants in terms of IT skills.

Dr David Bowers, the director of the OU’s undergraduate computing and IT programme, thinks that the decline in popularity in IT as a subject is due in part to way we all take computers for granted nowadays. “For the core course on our new degrees, which is called My Digital Life, we are trying to put some of the excitement back into computing. Computers in the future will be less important as devices you sit at, and more important as devices embedded in your environment. So we let students build and program their own ubiquitous device, using a ‘sense board’ that connects to their computers.

“People now tend to see computers as things to run software on or for social networking. There is no longer that awareness of the excitement and challenge of programming. In schools computers are tools to write reports on, rather than machines to be programmed. This is a false perception. There is still a lot of exciting stuff that can be done.”

‘The OU’s widening access to education is inspiring’

Open University researchers in human-computer interaction demonstrated a computer-controlled Music Jacket they are developing to help novice violin players improve their performance. Sensors in the prototype jacket track the player’s movements and give vibrotactile feedback when the violin or bow is held incorrectly.

The device was one of a range of projects shown to civil servant Martin Donnelly, permanent secretary at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, on a visit to the OU in June. “What I found most inspiring there,” said Donnelly, “was learning about the resources targeted to widen access to education across the UK, the technologies being developed to support students studying part-time and the commitment to educational excellence.”

Source: Yvonne Cook, Independent.co.uk, Tuesday 5th July 2011

More graduates choosing IT as a career

The number of UK graduates opting for a career in IT is creeping up slowly, but the profession is not attracting students in anything like the numbers it used to.

Back in 2001, nearly one in 10 final year undergraduates were entering IT.According to the UK Graduates Career Survey 2011, conducted by recruitment firm High Fliers, just 3.9 per cent of final year students applied for IT-related positions. That’s a small increase on the previous year, when just 3.5 per cent did so.

These days, bright young things are heading for jobs with investment banks or staying in further education, the High Fliers survey reported.

Today’s students are planning their future careers at the early stages of their undergraduate education, said Martin Birchall, managing director of High Fliers.

“A record number of students have made job hunting a key priority during their studies and started researching their career options in the first or second year of their degree, rather than leaving their job search until their final 12 months,” he said.

The implication for UK IT is clear: if the brightest youngsters are to be attracted into the profession, they need to be won over at an early stage – perhaps even before entering university.

The slight increase in the number of final-year students applying for jobs in IT is in stark contrast to the potential openings.

In 2010, the number of IT graduate vacancies rose by almost 80 per cent, according to specialist IT recruitment consultancy IntaPeople.

The High Fliers survey was based on nearly 18,000 face-to-face interviews with final year students from 30 of the UK’s universities.

Source: Gareth Morgan, Computing.co.uk, Thursday 19th May 2011