Nine in every 10 people will have to add to their skills by 2030. The CBI has been exploring the digital dimension of the country’s skills needs.
Every business is needing to address digital skills gaps - now and in the future. With job vacancies increasing and not enough people to fill them, businesses must start investing more in internal digital upskilling and reskilling or be left behind.
In late 2020 Microsoft and Goldsmith University London published a survey that explored the state of Digital Skills in the UK1. It concluded that despite accelerated digitalisation in response to COVID-19, a clear digital skills gap persists in UK organisations. With an estimated 3 million new technology job opportunities to appear in the first half of this current decade, there is an urgent need to grow digital skills and talent. Following the release of the report, a proposal was made for the CBI to explore whether there was an appetite for organisations to unite together to develop regional skills and talent hubs to create pools of UK technology and digital talent across key levelling up clusters.
To gain a clearer understanding of the gaps and solutions missing in relation to regional technology skills, we focused on Southwest England, where a lot of progress is already being made in the digital skills arena, particularly in the West of England area. The CBI convened a roundtable hosted by the University of Bristol consisting of several key stakeholders, including central and local government, further and higher education institutions, regional employers and global technology corporations to test interest in the proposal.
Here we explore the four key findings of the roundtable.
A skills-based approach to hiring technology and digital talent is the way forward
- Gone are the days where employers can only rely on traditional grades and qualifications to demonstrate competency, especially in the digital sphere where so much of the skills and knowledge is too new to have been fully captured by traditional pathways. A skills-based approach focusing on the competencies people can presently demonstrate, as opposed to the historical qualifications they possess, will be important as careers and job vacancies evolve faster than traditional qualification routes can keep up with. Steps you can take:
- You could invest in providing more mid-career support to employees and jobseekers applying to work with you.
- Check in with employees to see what they think their skills needs are at this stage in their career. Career fluidity is becoming increasingly common now and breaking things down by skills will allow individuals to better work out their own career progression needs.
- Look to provide on the job learning e.g. by commissioning third-party training or investing in online learning modules. On the job learning helps those who cannot spare evenings and weekends to train and upskill.
More collaboration in the technology space is needed
- There is a need for more partnerships and collaborative working between businesses and the education sector to ensure regions are flourishing. Students need to be leaving the education system with the up-to-date digital knowledge and competencies they need to be work ready.
- There is undoubtedly untapped potential in the regions that big technology organisations can tap into and invest in. There is a plea from CBI members to avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ and to look at how getting behind some of the existing ‘solutions’ for addressing digital skills gaps that are currently available.
- Business and education groups should pool together to identify common goals and how to achieve them. Businesses should also connect with their local further and higher education institutions.
- Colleges and further education institutions are working hard to deliver existing upskilling courses as well as develop new training to reflect the increasingly digital landscape.
- Financial and other support from organisations with an interest in upskilling a region is key to unlocking more and quicker upskilling. Technology companies in particular have the ability to put infrastructure in place without the constraints of bidding for government funding. Collaborating with further education (FE) providers can be the key to unlocking your business’s growth.
With the increase in remote working, employers want to avoid regional disparities in the availability of digital skills and talent
- It is important to avoid a concentration of digital skills talent in London to the detriment of other regions. . Efforts must be made to level up every region and ensure that digital opportunities are more evenly distributed across the country.
- There has long been a distinction between the types of skills prevalent in London compared to the rest of the country. With remote and hybrid working here to stay, employers setting up their businesses outside of London need to be sure they can recruit the right people with the right skills.. A shift away from the concentration of technical and digital skills in London is now urgently needed.
- Areas of economic deprivation need the funding and resources required to digitally upskill and reskill. This is essential to closing the social mobility gap across the country.
- There is undoubtedly untapped potential in the regions. Large businesses, especially Big Technology, already have a lot of the resources and infrastructure needed to unlock this potential.
- Changing perceptions of and attitudes towards forging a career in technology and digital outside of London is essential to the country’s levelling up agenda. There are already a number of initiatives aiming to help marginalised groups to learn digital skills e.g. coding courses from providers such as QA2.
- More needs to be done to make people who may not have previously considered a career in an area like cyber security aware that this is within their reach . young people and career changers alike need to be empowered to upskill and reskill into the technology sector.
Some gaps remain in identifying skills challenges as we continue to collect the data
- There are bodies already making strides in gathering data on current, emerging and future digital skills gaps in different parts of the country. However, more needs to be done to ensure that people and industries typically not as engaged with websites like LinkedIn are accounted for and represented.
- There is a need for tangible analysis of future technical and digital skills gaps. Bodies such as HMRC, the Department for Education’s (DfE) new Unit for Future Skills (UFS) and businesses such as LinkedIn have all started laying the groundwork in identifying current and future skills gaps.
- Early findings in the data show that CVs and skillsets needed in different regions are not aligning. People and businesses need to be empowered to identify their own digital skills gaps if the whole country is to level up and go for growth.
Businesses have a role to play in helping their employees to identify their own skills gaps and long term learning needs.
Some examples of regional initiatives
Participants were keen to emphasise that we should avoid 're-inventing the wheel'. Here are some examples of the regional initiatives highlighted by participants during and after the roundtable:
- The CBI’s Cyber Clusters project: Cyber Tech West, the CBI’s second national cluster demonstrator, will engage with cyber security, defence, and intelligence. It will also explore cross-sector applications for relevant and related technologies in adjacent sectors. The Cluster will be anchored in Cheltenham and delivered in partnership with CyNam (Cyber Cheltenham). The Cluster's four priority focus areas are Skills, Innovation, Investment, and Policy. Contact Devon Geary for more information.
- Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs): LSIPs will provide an agreed set of actionable priorities that employers, providers and stakeholders in a local area can get behind to drive change. See the CBI’s submission to the DfE on making LSIPs a success here. Designated Employer Representative Bodies (ERBs) will work closely with employers, providers and key stakeholders across 38 areas of England to develop evidence-based, credible, and actionable LSIPs. Each plan will set out the key changes needed in a local area to make technical skills training more responsive to employers’ needs. We can expect that every LSIP will take an interest in digital skills given that these are required across every region to some degree. Find out more about which ERBs have been designated in which region and how to get involved. Read government’s statutory guidance on LSIPs.
Some examples of national initiatives
- Digital skills bootcamps: find out more about DfE’s skills bootcamps here.
- AWS re/Start: Amazon Web Service’s re/Start programme’s full curriculum includes AWS Cloud Certification, Python, Linux and Bash, hands on access to labs and a suite of professional development skills. AWS pledged to support 29 million people to reskill into technology by 2025. The mission of the re/Start program is championing fair access through to careers in technology. Find out more here.
Summary
- We set out to better understand the digital skills landscape on a regional level. We found it is important to focus on outcomes and avoid duplication of efforts in this space. To this end, businesses must continue to work together and with the education system to further what is already in motion and identify where gaps persist and how to address them.
- Speak to Victoria to feed into the CBI’s digital skills policy asks.
- What barriers are you facing that prevent your organisation from working more collaboratively towards developing regional technology and digital skills?
- What levers need to be pulled to create the rich pools of technology and digital talent we need across the UK?
