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With the growth in IT jobs beating the recession and continued reports of skills shortages in UK industry, why is it that yet again computer science graduates are reported to have the worst unemployment rates of any subject at 14%?
The IT and telecoms industry, which employs one in 20 of the workforce, is predicted to grow nearly five times faster than the UK average, according to a report by e-skills UK, with more than half a million new entrants required between 2012 and 2017. Nine out of 10 firms are suffering IT and telecoms related shortages which is delaying the development of new products and services, the report adds.
The growing demand from students around the world for UK qualifications is evidence that UK universities offer a high level of technical skills and knowledge. Recent international comparisons have ranked the teaching and research in UK universities among the best, and qualification comparison bodies such as NARIC rank UK qualifications in the highest quality band worldwide. Yet, many employers complain that graduates are not being taught the skills they want and many large employers admit to recruiting only from elite Russell Group universities.
How does this picture compare to the rest of the world? The USA also reports increasing demand coupled with skills shortages in some IT sectors, and this is repeated across the EU, in Canada, and in Australia. By contrast, in much of the developing world employers are willing to invest in further qualifications for their staff, which is one reason why there is significant demand for UK postgraduate degrees amongst international students.
So why are many recent UK computer science graduates unemployed? Input from the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC), based on a recent report it commissioned, which investigated data produced by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), cites a number of interrelated factors affecting unemployment. Some of these factors are obvious, such as the quality of the degree obtained, location within the UK, and institution of study, but one other key factor was the employment rates of black and minority ethnic (BME) students.
Computer science has been at the forefront of the widening access agenda, with a far higher proportion of BME students studying it than other, more traditional science and engineering subjects. This also influences the balance of student numbers between the post-92 universities and Russell Group institutions, with 64% of computer science students studying at post-92s (65% of those BME students), as opposed to 13% at Russell Group universities (10% of those BME).
BME graduates have higher unemployment rates across all subjects, and even BME computer science students from Russell Group institutions had a 16.7% unemployment rate compared to an average Russell Group unemployment rate of 7.2%. However, we do need to be clear that many of these students come from, and still live in, areas of extremely high unemployment, where a figure of 16.7% would be heralded as a significant success story.
It can and should be argued that any consideration of graduates' employment needs to be contextualised against their contemporaries, rather than making unrealistic comparisons between institutions that draw from significantly different demographics. Having said that, there is considerable bias in the employment prospects for graduates of BME origin with similar or better qualifications than their white counterparts, which has even resulted in graduates changing or "anglicising" their names to obtain interviews.
Most employers are now looking for graduates with two to three years' work experience – in the past, graduate recruitment schemes would take new graduates and train them in the workplace. These schemes have largely vanished, with employers arguing that their investment is wasted as the graduates swiftly move on. There are also many reports that suggest the offshoring of graduate IT work has reduced the number of entry-level jobs available, and this short term strategy by employers is now strangling the pipeline necessary to develop experienced IT professionals.
Recent changes to the school curriculum have introduced the teaching of computer science at GCSE and A-level – with an emphasis on coding – which should reap significant benefits. Ensuring that school pupils have a strong technical understanding of computer science, and the ability to program and develop computer systems, will mean that both employers and educators will have a much stronger pool of talent to draw upon. In turn, this will enable the evolution of on-the-job training and degree-level education to meet the future needs of the IT industry.
This positive development will come to nothing, however, if we do not address the other contributing factors that result in the current high level of computer science graduate unemployment. So what should we do? Two clear messages emerge from our research. Firstly, the employment prospects of BME graduates needs to be tackled at a national level. Only parity of treatment by employers will enable the benefits of widening access to higher education, and the particular success of computer science in attracting students from diverse communities.
Secondly, employers need to be incentivised to reintroduce graduate training schemes and stop offshoring graduate jobs, to provide employment prospects for new graduates that will rebuild the pool of talent and experience for the UK IT industry. These issues can be tackled locally or nationally, but they must be tackled or the UK will lose its current world-leading position as a knowledge economy.
Liz Bacon is professor and dean of computing and mathematical sciences, and Lachlan MacKinnon is professor of computing science at the University of Greenwich – follow it on Twitter @UniofGreenwich
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