The number of U.K. students applying to study Computer Science has halved in the last five years. Even if the numbers of applicants recovered to previous levels, there would still not be enough to meet the demand for software developers, says a new report published by an initial working party that included the Lancaster University Management School, British Computer Society and Microsoft.
The £20 billion U.K. IT industry employs almost one million people and needs almost 150,000 new entrants every year. But with IT no longer perceived to be an attractive career, there has been an alarming drop of 50% in the application to computer-related degrees in the last five years. That includes a 47% drop in system-engineering students and a 60% drop in software-engineering students. Today, just about 20,000 new IT graduates pass out every year.
This will lead to acute shortage in high-end software skills. Asia and Eastern Europe, which are producing a good number of IT graduates will be the beneficiary of such shortage, says the report.
The report also says that a threat to the industry is that insufficient U.K. software developers are being trained in the higher-level skills that will be in demand in the future. Other countries in Asia and Eastern Europe are showing they can do the same quality of sophisticated software development work as the U.K., but at lower cost. These countries are not only producing hundreds of thousands of IT graduates every year, but are also home to workers trained in specialized skills.
According to the Global Skills Report released last year (July 2005) by IT certification agency, Brainbench, the U.K. slipped to seventh position in the list of top ten countries in terms of total IT certifications, from the fifth position it held in the previous study, released in 2003. Romania and Ukraine — two of the Eastern European countries moved ahead of the U.K. in that ranking. In the individual skills ranking too, the U.K. did not feature among the top three countries in any of the 30 different IT skills for which the ranking was done. It managed to get to the fourth or fifth position in six areas — Oracle PL, SQL (ANSI), C++, C#, Java 2 and technical helpdesk skills.
