TOO FEW GRADUATES CAN CODE, SAY TECH FIRM BOSSES
UK graduates are missing out on jobs because their grasp of digital technology is not strong enough, according to top employers.
Technology firms say there are too few graduates with digital skills, such as web design or computer programming, for the jobs available. Hugh Milward, director of corporate affairs at Microsoft said:
“In the software industry alone there are 20,000 graduate vacancies a year, and only 7,500 computer science graduates to fill them.
“Digital skills such as coding are being demanded not only by the high-tech sector, but by fast-growing sectors like media, publishing and finance.”
And new research from O2 showed that parents could be indirectly responsible for the skills shortage as they are encouraging their children into “traditional” careers which they consider to be stable and low-risk, but which are actually more competitive than fast-growing new industries which involve the use of technology. The mobile phone company said this showed a “disturbing disconnect” between skills in demand from employers and those valued by parents.
One in 10 of 2,000 parents said they would “actively discourage” their kids from digital jobs such as coding. And 23% thought digital skills were “irrelevant”. In contrast, 38% said they would advise their children to take up law or medicine.
Twice the number of students in the UK took up degrees in medicine compared with computer science between 2012 and 2013, according to figures from the Higher Education Statistics Association. Ann Pickering at O2, said it was “no surprise” parents were “struggling” to keep pace, adding:
“I’m a parent, and if I didn’t work for a technology company I wouldn’t realise the opportunities that are out there. [But] it is getting harder to get the skills we [at O2] require. These are skills that didn’t exist five years ago, like with social media, for example.”
If your digital skills are somewhat lacking, it’s not to late. Many recruitment experts say that taking a short course in social media or coding – such as Decoded’s ‘Code in a Day’ can give you the edge when applying for graduate roles.
*WISH YOU’D STUDIED SOMETHING MORE TECHY?
If you studied a ‘traditional’ or creative course and are struggling to find paid work, do you regret not studying a more technical degree course? Who advised you to study the subject you picked? Do careers advisers, parents and teachers need to modernise their views on what the ‘safest’ subjects to study are now, in today’s digital world?
I think unfortunately at the moment there’s still a massive lack of confidence in the digital industry from parents, teachers and career advisors – because it’s still seen as ‘new’ and a bit of a ‘fad’, despite the fact it’s one of the fastest growing industries out there. Also, I think it’s all still a bit unknown and that frightens parents and teachers – because if they don’t understand what’s involved, how will they be able to talk to their children or students about it?
In terms of who’s to blame, that’s a tricky one – and I don’t think we can actually pinpoint anyone. I agree that teachers, career advisors and parents maybe need to rethink their opinions – and learn more about the industry before they can advise their children and students on the most viable careers available.
Educating people about digital careers is something we work hard to do at Bubble Jobs – through our site and our Digital Career Portal – and we’re currently in the process of setting up career advisor events to educate them about digital jobs and careers as part of our pledge to the European Commission’s Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs – http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/node/69517/
It is always interesting to hear these stories about shortage of IT graduates, and that more young people need to learn how to code. The stark reality is that unemployment in Computer Science graduates is alarmingly high – 14% was the figure from 2011/2012 DLHE figures https://www.hesa.ac.uk/dox/pressOffice/sfr192/0106_SFR192_DLHE_2011_12_Table_3.xls
I’m sure that Mr Milward of Microsoft would like more young people to take technical courses rather than study medicine, because typically those students will be high academic achievers. However, while the unemployment rate for Medicine & Dentistry remains 0% (same link), I can understand why parents may be a little more assertive towards encouraging their kids to aspire to be a doctor rather than a Software Engineer
I don’t think that you can point to one particular thing and say that that needs changing. Whilst parents may push for ‘safer’ and more traditional careers such as medicine, it may be more to a ‘generational’ gap whereby new technologies have developed rapidly since the career advice they got themselves.
Likewise for career advisers – if the courses themselves change massively on a year to year basis it can become difficult for them to gain the knowledge to provide the necessary information to the kids – particularly ones who work with younger kids.
Just focusing on this report, and medicine in particular, some careers are easier to inspire and relate to. It’s an easier ‘sell’ (for want of a better phrase) for career advisers, parents and teachers. If they don’t have a passion or can relate to it, then it can be more difficult to push digital jobs more.
In regards to the unemployment rate, I’d suggest that a majority of the leavers will be well educated and ‘high’ academic achievers. Whether the broadness of degrees may be a problem whereby graduates don’t have the more specific experience that employers are looking for could impact on the rate. Social Mobility with large ‘groupings’ of technology hubs could also play a factor.
Hopefully the coding clubs for primary schools with the push of Raspberry Pi’s alongside the new business backed Degree for Software Development will improve standards.
Hi Guys,
More progressive credentialism. YAY!!! Now we have to spend our entire lives in college to get the computer skills we need in order to get a job. In other words, by the time graduates are rolling off the assembly lines they will be 70 years old and dead.
None of them will never make it into the real world of work. They just graduate with debt and that’s it lol :-p
Will we need all these people who can code in 30 or 40 years time? This article does raise an important issue about how quickly the world is changing and that is arguably part of the problem.
I did programming as part of my physics degree. Frankly I’d rather shoot myself than do it again, job or no job.
Conversely, We have the view reported within Forbes Magazine, therein asserting “Should all social media managers be under 25”
“http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2012/07/23/should-all-social-media-managers-be-under-25/”
Granted, the article was written by a 22 year old University Student, and was universally derided, but it has become par for the course that IT has become notorious for being a closed tradesman-type of route for the over 30s. Of course, IT is not a Profession, and college/university programmes providing such training, do not offer a Scientific, Engineering or Professional Basis where (for example) Coding Monkeys may be acknowledges as Professional.
I am a software engineer; so would like to provide an insider’s perspective.
I graduated last year and started my job within a couple of months. I’d also interned at the company the previous summer.
It’s a good industry to be getting into at the moment. I heard a statistic that we need 9,600 new people coming in every year in Scotland alone. My company recruits (paid) interns and graduates every year.
The work environment is very relaxed – it’s a feet on the desk, wear your favourite jeans sort of office. Working from home is very common and the hours are pretty flexible. And, bluntly, the money is good.
Right down to primary schools now, people are saying that everyone should learn to write code. I don’t accept that. All graduates being able to code is like saying we all should be able to run a marathon or write a novel: if it’s applicable to the job then sure! We all have different talents and the skill of translating concepts into something a computer understands is something that doesn’t come naturally to many people.
The fact that our industry needs more people doesn’t somehow imply that your industry needs coders.
If you enjoyed that little bit of programming you might’ve done at school or think you’re a good problem solver and want to give it a try, then by all means learn to code. Try googling “python tutorial” – python is a powerful language but clear for beginners which makes it a great place to start. But don’t be under any illusions that it’ll suddenly get you a job in any random industry. It’s another string to your bow and demonstrates logical thinking but it’s still up to you to convince an employer that it is relevant to the role you apply for.
I actually considered self teaching Python since it came with one of the programmes I use. My experience has been mainly with Fortran. I think some people ‘get it’ and others don’t. I certainly needed more time with it than half a semester.
Yup, yup, yup. I’m an English student right now, second year. According to prospects.ac.uk, a large number of English graduates go into (surprise, surprise)… Marketing, PR and sales; Publishing; Journalism; and other clerical and editorial work. (http://www.prospects.ac.uk/options_english.htm) The problem is, that now those are all changing to be largely digital industries. Marketing is now ‘digital marketing’, i.e., knowing how to craft a persuasive email or tweet (not to mention using Photoshop or another image editor to make those sweet banner headings), Journalism is now online journalism (can you upload something to wordpress, making sure all the links are working, with tags and picture captions in under 10 minutes?), clerical work uses Excel databases, and publishing involves InDesign, wordpress, Excel when crafting a publishing schedule, and a host of other specialised digital tools.
And how much of that have I actually learned on my English course?
Sweet fuck all.
EVERYTHING I’ve learned about technology at university – from the most utterly basic “how to use wordpress!”, to promoting myself or a service on twitter, to html-coding a site to better present my writing portfolio – I have learned outside of my course, either by accident (attending a technology convention which I thought would be less ‘technical’ than it turned out to be), as part of extra-curricular activities (writing for the student paper and putting it online) or from the careers service (‘social media and your career’ sessions). But every single internship I apply for (at least in the marketing sector) asks for one, if not all of these skills.
That’s not entirely surprising, of course, because that’s not what the modern ‘English’ course is about. That’s what ‘Marketing’ courses (you know – those ‘doss’ ‘easy’ degrees that we intelligent A-Level students are encouraged to stay away from) are about. It’s still not caught up, in that respect. And on one level you can hardly blame an English degree for not preparing its grads for the ‘real world’, because it’s not what ‘English’ is all about, conventionally. It’s notorious for being a non-vocational degree.
But it’s vital to realise that if you are going to do an English course now, it is very, very important to do stuff alongside your 6 or 7 contact hours a week that will actually make you some semblance of employable. Having got a first in your creative writing module or 18th-century literature essay is now (even more) absolutely useless to most employers – UNLESS you have a good sense of how to apply those same skills to a ‘work’ task.
You can write well? Good. But can you use twitter? Got a blog? Know SEO? Completed an online ‘AdWords’ course? Got a treehouse html certification, or even just googled around a bit and learned how to gussy up your tumblr? Got an online portfolio of your writing work on ideasTap? Blog for places online, your favourite video games site, your student paper? Got a part-time job doing or using any of these things? Because that’s what’s going to make an actual difference to your CV. There was once a time, perhaps, when internships would allow you to learn all these ‘on the job’, without asking for them as a starting point. No longer. You must know these already in order to be in with a shout. Any of those skills will make you instantly more employable than say 50% of other English students out there, and about on par with most Marketing students and a few BTEC Communcations students and tech-savvy A-Levelers with a GCSE in IT Skills.
For example: I haven’t seriously used Excel since Year 9 in high school (no IT for GCSE!), yet every single job application wants someone who can ‘has experience with databases like Excel’. So I lie, and say that my skills with it are more advanced than they are. I have to.
Another big thing is ‘photo editing skills’ – fortunately, I did learn this as part of my course, on a Publishing module this year, for which I had to produce a 12-page magazine using InDesign. That was, no lie, one of the best modules I’ve done so far, I think. Because it was applicable.
There are, of course, English-related jobs where you probably needn’t do all these things (proofreading? signwriting? copywriting, but that two is for a digital audience in a digital medium), but there is a vanishing pool of them because (guess what?) – print media is dying. Analogue media is dying. And English degrees are not teaching their students these skills. They are things they must learn on there own. And there comes a time when English degrees badly need to teach their English students something alongside just ‘writing well’ – a literary blog for the creative work produced by the English faculty, ‘Journalism’ or ‘Publishing’ modules where students are taught InDesign and WordPress that have more than one lecturer and offer more than 14 students per year places, an extracurricular ‘beginners programming club’ – that will be applicable in this new digital world, so that they don’t die out too. Until then, we’re at an interesting stage where we’re all, basically, navigating a new rapidly-changing jobs landscape on our own. And we’re rapidly approaching the stage where English Literature degrees may be even worse than their “useless” stereotype.
@Lucy
Interesting post. My degree is vocational – study computer science, learn to write software, get job writing software – so it’s good to hear a perspective from an English student. It is difficult to make the link between writing essays and doing an actual job. I’ll confess I’m one of the people who wonder what the use of English Literature is…
It sounds like you’re doing well picking up digital skills and that should help you stand out from the crowd when you come to apply for jobs. However, when you’re – ahem – exaggerating your Excel skills it’s worth noting that Excel is not a database; it’s a spreadsheet package. The MS Office database package is Access.
You write very well – as a bit of a grammar pedant it’s nice to see something in the bottom half of the internet punctuated like that! With that and the other skills you’re clearly working hard for, you should be ok.
Good luck job hunting when the time comes.
I’m starting my second year on a 75% maths degree and already looking into internships. The problem is that I see how few get taken into these programs and even fewer are taken onto graduate schemes. It makes me worry as I want to be working in something mathematical but as well as the fact I won’t have a huge amount of statistics in my degree(due to courses taken in music), I’m not hugely interested in jobs labelled as accountant or similar(i.e. analyst etc.) as I know they ALWAYS want even more training and don’t feel I’d be using my degree as much as I want(probably not much at all). I want to get into applied sciences/engineering roles though so am keen to work on my coding-did a bit of Python and started on Java, am hoping to know more of Java and even go on to C++ if possible. The thing is that my dad IS a computer programmer, has a degree equivalent to one in eal-time programming and worked in a lab sorting out programmes for scientists and he HATED his job! He knows there are jobs in these industries but would never have advised me to go down the route and is now telling me quite often that with a maths degree I don’t need to be able to code.