Back in the 1980s businesses were saying that what schools needed to teach was industry standard software of the sort they would use at work - aka training in Microsoft products.

Teachers pointed out to no avail, that what was needed was generic training in computing since by the time pupils left school computing would look very different to what it did then. Needless to say they were ignored - they were simply vested interests and 'businessmen' knew it all. Schools were duly equipped with Windows PCs running MS Office and children who might once have learnt the joys of programming a Sinclair ZX were drilled in the merits of Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

This whole philosophy has now moved upward to the Universities where many so called 'computer science' courses are little more than training in the use of Microsoft tools. The idea that students should be trained in generic programming techniques and given the necessary academic background to adapt and apply their knowledge to whatever system an employer uses, seems to be out of fashion.

it has to be said that anyone possessing the necessary mathematical skills of the type suggested in the article above, is far more likely to be attracted by the large salaries and bonuses on offer in the City.

When I used to have to recruit software developers it was a complete nightmare to find even adequate people. Plenty of applicants with appropriate qualifications but most were useless. Got to the point where I would prefer interview people from non IT courses, normally people with some science qualifications as they seemed better capable.

The video games industry is hugely competitive. I don't think a university course about it will change the fact that anyone wanting to work in that market needs to be extremely dynamic, creative and enterprising. No wonder the rate of employment for graduates in such courses remain low.

Software evolves all the time, and this could invariably outstrip the resources of school ICT departments and in certain cases universities offering computer science. Companies could work more closely with schools in particular to ensure that pupils are provided with sufficient computer skills and that teachers are fully informed about the latest developments.

The truth is that if you want a job as a software developer and expect to be well paid then you will have to have spent thousands of hours of your own time learning and experimenting.

A couple of semesters turning in Java and C# assignments does not equip anyone to work at the sharp end of the industry.

My advice would be to work your way through the problems on Topcoder, USACO and SPOJ and a copy of Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen et al.

If you can implement efficient algorithms quickly in your language of choice then someone will snap you up.

Software engineering is a scientific and mathematical discipline, like many other employments that are desperately crying out for qualified people. We need scientists and engineers to develop and build things to make the country money.

The problem is scientists and engineers have literally different thought processes from spending years perfecting their discipline, that allow them to grasp and develop new technologies, innovations and discoveries. (development of this area usually comes at the expense of other areas - which is why engineers, bankers, and scientists are not known for their empathy and humanity) That method of thinking has to be developed pretty much from birth.

Right now, by 14 most students do not have (and will physically never develop) the cognitive ability to successfully pursue a career in fields such as computing. to compensate this, rather than fail most of the population, the education system teaches students how to use the tools without going into the depth of the principals as to why they work. (and why Microsoft's easy to use software features prevalently in the computer labs of educational establishments) Employers know this, and the students although succeeding at education fail to find employment.

If we are serious about this (and we should be as innovation is the only way we will be prosperous in the long term) we need to re-build the entire education system around the development of maths and science. We need to scrap the current target driven culture so that Children get an appreciation of the beauty that is found in maths and the sciences so they want to learn themselves, instead of merely satisfy a criteria on a test.

This is not actually that new or radical; if one googles "Piaget, child as a scientist" will show the theory as to why this works.

It used to be assumed that training in advanced specific skills would be provided by the companies. The function of education was to provide students who could cope with such training. But increasingly, companies expect others to do their work for them. This is not going to happen: it is not economically viable to provide the particular mix that most companies want. And neither did this happen with the generations that graduated in the 50s, 60s and 70s who developed much of the innovative infrastructure of their day.

The real scandal is the IT literacy of sausage factory workers. it's shocking.

It would be illuminating if the Guardian could reveal the puny salaries on offer for such skills in the UK, and then compare them with such places as Munich, Zurich and Silicon Valley. Then it would become clear why those of us who possess such skills work almost our entire careers outside the UK.

The problem with much of UK industry is both its principles and principals. Its principles, particularly that of minimising R & D and maximising short-term profit as well as abdicating taking responsibility for training raw and able products. Its principals because these are the people that perpetuate this torrid state of affairs.

I work in IT and one of the problems is the learning never stops and there are not enough hours in the day.

Do you specialise or become a jack of all trades?

Many a time you see a potential job and of the 45 pieces of software they ask you to be fluent in you've only had time to learn 41 so you're screwed.

Games programming is something of a dark art, isn't it? Ideally we'd want 12 year old boys and girls with Playstation 3 dev kits today so that by the time they are 18 they've got a handle on it all.

I appreciate the thrust of the piece, but there's a bit of a mishmash of terminology. Computer science is not programming, front-end web development isn't really programming... before figuring out what needs to be done, the language has to be cleared up!

That said...

but this year it took us several months to recruit a front-end web developer.

Amen to that. I was looking for someone to fill the same position, and it took a long time to do it. No shortage of applicants, but the quality of their work was actually shocking in many cases. Many of them had completed "web design" or "web development" or "digital media" courses, and it clearly didn't prepare them for the job.

I've found that the best candidates are those from outside the field entirely. Not a single one of our current web development team studied as a web developer - we've mostly had engineers and physicists. Maybe it's the self-learning that makes a better candidate.

And how about the sausage-making skills of IT graduates? Even worse apparently.

Amazing how years of liberal leftism has taken away our ability to distinguish between training and ability isn't it?

We don't need people with qualifications we need people with skills and sometimes that runs against the social mobility dogma that "anyone who is dumb enough to pay good money for a bad IT course is as good as we are allowed to hope for".

I've often thought, given that the aggregate skill set required by this country must be changing more rapidly than in the past, that it would make sense for more of our 'education' to be integrated into employment itself than has previously been the case. I've no idea how practical a solution this is though, would be interesting to hear what people think..

The government is poised to overhaul the teaching of computer science in schoolsand univesity

It's not just computing courses that lack rigour and depth.

A lot of the core material has been removed from science, maths and engineering courses and replaced with badly conceived optional modules and projects, which are pitched at a low level because (surprise, surprise) students lack fundamental understanding in core areas.

Universities are more concerned with 'transferrable skills', 'learning objectives and outcomes' and 'feedback' than they are with the actual effing content of a course. They obsess over the numbers of upper seconds and firsts, keeping an eye on league table data to make sure they don't lag behind.

The providers of high education no longer know what the purpose of higher education is. Is it preparation for research and other scholarly activity, or is it simply preparation for the world of work?

In trying to have it both ways, they've ended up with courses that are neither academic enough to prepare students for research, nor vocational enough to hone practical skills for the world outside academia.

I was in a similar situation

I took to employing self taught developers who had decent portfolios and a bit of passion.

Another issue I found with graduates was that they hardly knew how to actually "work", you know the basic stuff like turning up on time (5 days a week), sticking to one hour for lunch - that kind of malarky.

This is what happens when you allow microsoft and cisco to dictate the national curriculum.

Much of ICT in schools is focused around business software provided by Microsoft. Students are not encouraged to think outside of that neat world. Closed source software and proprietary data formats and 'standards' which require a patent license to use further reduce the scope for a rounded IT education. ICT in schools needs to move beyond that small world.

Real World IT is heterogeneous, modular and interoperable. Real world IT is also entirely dependent on open source and open standards (HTML, HTTP, TCP/IP, etc).

When ICT in education catches up with Real World IT school leavers and graduates will then be skilled up to work in it.

Note: I've worked in and around Secondary level ICT providing support and services to schools - my observation is based on experience. I've managed large scale deployments (1800 servers, 35,000 users). I'm an advocate of open source and open standards (member of Open Source Consortium and winner of Cabinet Office award for open source in healthcare IT) for the public sector.

Even back in the 1970s if you recruited IT graduates you knew you would spend a year making them lose the bad habits and useless ideas from their courses, and then a year teaching them what they needed to know to do the job. In a world where the five most in-demand IT jobs in 2011 did not exist in 2005, there is no chance of schools, or even most 'universities' being able to recruit and keep anyone with any current understanding.

It is almost impossible for professionals to keep up with the industry and its changes nowadays. Most IT teachers, at whatever level, will be teaching horse husbandry in the age of cars. Can't be helped.

Schools must learn how to teach the basic principles, like logic, reasoning, and psychology, and then employers must add the relevant partsdo that they need.

In the old days, these were called Apprenticeships. These require commitment from both the employee and employer and a certain amount of risk on both sides.

Since when were newly graduated candidates any use for anything?
You recruit someone with potential. It can take three or four years for them to be any use to you.
Employers commenting here are looking back to the 80s, when self motivated/ self taught geeks were leading the curve. The software on offer on micro computers was easily accessed, and easily improved. Try to get started in the same way now, and you won't get anywhere.
interestingly, in Japan, certainly in larger companies, they don't expect new graduates to be any practical use.

I like the distinction between training and education that James P Carse proposed. Training is how to avoid surprise; education is for surprise. The world is rapidly changing and what we need most are attention spans and deeper thinking skills. Specific technical IT skills are all very well but as technology is moving fast, the training is unlikely to keep up and so what is actually needed is real education in rigorous analytical disciplines like maths, sciences and the traditional humanities, and that is sorely lacking. Instead we have pseudo vocational subjects like IT and Business Studies that don't teach thinking, don't teach questioning only limited answers. Properly educated people are capable of endlessly retraining themselves for specific skills that rapidly date and then need replacing. As an employer, what I therefore urge is not some bs IT training universe but real education supplemented by some skill training.

Having similar woes with recruiting people for developer roles. There's a distinct lack of talent out there.

One of the problems I've found is the fact that people don't seem to know the difference between Information Technology and Computer Science. When I was at school we were taught Information Technology (a subject almost redundant for any child that has now grown up in a computer-ubiquitous world) up to 16 years old. This consisted of projects on how to send an email, and create a website in Microsoft Front Page (don't ever).

I didn't get any formal Computer Science training until I started college, and I had to elect to take that course.

Computer Science training should start earlier, and not treat children like they have no idea what a mouse is.

Two excellent posts hitting the nail bang on the head.

My wife and I both started computing in the early 1960s.

I learned at least three languages on two platforms in the space of three years with two different employers. They expected that.

Since then we have been in project management and also learned new languages, techniques and platforms. It takes about 6 months for really bright people to become skilled in a new language or platform, and employers aren't willing to wait that long. As soon as a new product comes out they place an ad for people with three years experience.

I also briefly taught part of a Computer Science course at University to HND students. The courses cover many aspects of computing and it is ridiculous to expect graduates to immediately be set to work in a specialist environment.

The quality of the UKs unqualified management leaves a lot to be desired.

Where are the entry level IT jobs? Ummm being offshored to India. British taxpayer owned banks are offshoring it all overseas because it is cheaper - in the short term. I don't think politicians understand IT as an industry and the IT industry is rubbish at speaking out. Until the IT industry unionises no one will do a thing.

I'd avoid programming like the plague - companies are simply outsourcing thousands of jobs to Mumbai. Why pay someone in the UK a wage when they can pay a third as much in India.

It's not like you have to be in the country to do the programming - it's too easy to outsource.

This is a really confused article! ICT is to Computer Science as knowing how to drive a fork-lift truck is to designing and manufacturing the thing.

Our educational system has taken a woefully bad course on comp. sci. since the early 1990s (full disclosure: I did a conversion degree in CS in 1989-90 and worked for over a decade as a technical author and programmer). Back then, CS was about understanding how computers worked and knowing how to build them and/or program them. But the subsequent trend has been towards user skills -- using Microsoft Office, for example -- which are useful as basic literacy tools but utterly useless to the software industry.

Part of the issue in not being able to get staff is the poor recruitment practises used, in particular the use of recruitment agencies.

Many of the recruitment agencies are staffed by salesmen & women who use a checklist to recruit people. They have no understanding of the role they are suppose to fill & skills required. They also use their stereotypes of what they "think" someone doing the role should look like & be to put CVs forward to companies.

I've had more than one role in recent years that when my CV was put forward by an agency the company never received it. However when I managed to get my CV in front of the company by other means I got the role.

When I've pointed out I applied a few months before the company has been surprised & also confirmed they did use the original recruiter.

The quality of the UKs unqualified management leaves a lot to be desired.

But it's like football! You tell Harry Redknapp he needs training to be a manager! Blah, blah.

We like our amateurs in this country, don't we? It's not all the fault of the managers though. Lots of people who should know better rubbish fields of study that don't have a medieval lineage.

Unfortunately, one of them is now Secretary of State for Education.

There's a distinct lack of talent out there.

I dount it. I bet you don't even look at anyone over 40.

To come at this from another angle: many courses taking public money to teach IT skills to the unemployed are essentially fraudulent.

I was once compelled to attend such a course as a condition of receiving Jobseeker's Allowance, even though I didn't need what was on offer, having those skills already. It was a non-negotiable 'condition', you see.

Most of those attending the intro meeting were clearly never going to find work in the IT sector, or indeed any office, and I felt very strongly that the course tutors both knew that, and found it all amusing: after all, jobs for them, and nice profits for their company wth the government contract.

One can say the same probably for most advisory services aiming to help unemployed people establish their own businesses. My 'advisor' spent his time telling me about the rather nice house he was having built in Mallorca, with his profits from the public purse. Not one decent piece of busines advice, technical or general could he offer.......

Information Technology develops so rapidly that teachers are often in a position of continuing to teach what they know, which is years out of date. When I did a computer sciences course at my local University, I found that we were learning programming using a language designed for pre-windows operating systems, and though we learned principles, which would be useful for programming in any language, what we learned was not applicable to creating programmes to run on current computers. When I did later go on a course for 4th Generation Languages, I had to unlearn quite a lot of what I understood from before.

In the workplace, I have always found it a problem to be more intelligent and able than one's managers, and as my managers were, in the main, computer illiterate, in addition to not being very bright, my computer skills were not particularly encouraged.

I´d prefer to eat a sausage than a mouse.

IT is a joke in British schools. It is simply training in office software, fine if you want to be an admin clerk but not if your kids want to learn about computers. Instead IT should be scrapped and computer science taught in its place. Instead of separate IT lessons, IT should be integrated into the whole curriculum across the board

How?

Glad you got the job.

Incredibly depressing post though. There's no reason why recruitment consultants shouldn't be really sharp. After all, like investment bankers, they're right at the "crossroads", where buyers and sellers meet. They should know everything happening in the economy. When they aren't recruiting, they should be researching.

(Investment bankers do know a lot, I'm not being sarcy. But like anyone else, they aren't improved by self-regulation)

The point for many organizations is they can't have their cake and eat it, either they must try to get the point across to change the curriculum to a more CS-based IT course, or they have to take in a CS/Engineering graduate who may not be up-to-date and help them.

Not every graduate can be expected to be this little whizz-bang hacker kid with a portfolio full of open source project contributions and can think from a top-down approach. It takes time to understand the intricacies of an IDE or Framework or many concepts of CS; and all too often development houses will air themselves up in this little enterprise bubble of extremely specific skillsets unattainable for most engineering graduates.

Take me; I was always more occupied with composing music as a teenager, so I never had time to pick up programming; when I did try I found it was a mess of words I didn't understand and found the whole thing too esoteric. I decided to do Electronic Engineering at uni and realised (when I was 19) that what I really wanted to do was Embedded and Computer Engineering. So I tried to tailor the course as best as I can to software, but it just wasn't enough. They either expected me to be an incredible coder or well-versed in disciplines not done on my course.

Were I to have taken a good GCSE course on the principles of coding, hardware and software, I would have had enough smarts to seek out the knowledge myself on the internet and gain an appreciation that no one's realistically going to help you learn how to be a good engineer, you have to gain a passion for it and live it.

Luckily I found a great, stable job, while not my ideal line of work, that has given me the encouragement and time to skill up and understand, and the amount I have learned and contributed this year alone is staggering, if I do say so myself. But I still have a long way (years) to go before I feel confident I have the necessary skills to enter into the line of work I do want to be in. Still, I feel that it could be 5-10 years of my life not being able to prove my worth in a profession and it feels I'm wasting my life, a little bit.

I can see the comments here getting right out of hand.

Great article. Definitely draws attention to a 'skills shortage', 'lack of training' etc. in the UK and pretty sure we're all gonna get flamed and trolled for comments we make.

First off - lumping all IT/tech together in one pretty article just doesn't work. The skills of games developers differ quite a lot from IT support people and so on. It's impossible to "teach IT" to the masses where there are a thousand directions you could go in - and how many jobs are available to people who did Computer Science with Games Development from Wolverhampton, for example? (ironically, we've hired two such graduates). Web-developers, all shiny and C#, aren't too much use when a virtual server goes down, and so on.

You're lucky if you can find IT people that can have a grown-up conversation about technology within an organisation with the decision makers. What you can hope for, at best, are people with a keen interest in technology who at least know the difference between the front and back of a physical computer (at the most basic IT job level) who can then remember instructions on where to solve common problems (hello! Google) and go from there. When we recruit IT helpdesk staff, it's all about personality, foremost, because they need to be able to talk to non-technical people.

ANYONE can pass a Microsoft exam - they're available on websites all over, and you can ride through an exam just remembering right and wrong answers -- and people use Microsoft exams to judge skills -- a terrifying state of affairs.

Teaching people how to use Microsoft softwareisn't a terrible idea - its still used in.. oooh.. over 90% of all the world's computer machines - and 10 years ago I had to "re-train" a secretary because she wrote all her letters in Excel as she didn't know how to right-align people's addresses when writing letters in Microsoft Word..

Sure I've got lots more to say, but off outside to enjoy the fresh air for a bit.

Look out for such people running degree courses soon.

Just had a look at the pay for Web Developers in the Londoin area.

The pay is the problem.

Employers are not investing in training, they are not liaising with further education or schools, they want qualified people on the cheap and are not prepared to invest in the talent that's available. They then blame schools for their lack of action and investment a malaise that runs through all of British industry.

"Poor-quality training and 'sausage factory' courses leave companies struggling to recruit computer-literate workers"

I sympathise with the predicament of companies..... unfortunately, if they dont engage with the Education/Training System, dont provide sponsorship or placements for candidates at College and University, and adopt a laissez fair attitude, then unfortunately responsibility for any skills shortage is down to the incompetence of Business Managers within UK SME's.

Theres an interesting discussion on this. I feel it resonates with me and just how painful it was when I was looking for these programmer positions

I used to employ a few people in Papua New Guinea. I'd show them how I'd solve the problems and then let them have a go. Best programmer I trained was Johnny Waxie who only had one year of high school. He rose quite rapidly through the ranks but then died young, as most PNGs do. The ones I got from UNI I had to re-train. They don't teach commercial computing there, only theory that is flawed. I had employees with doctorates from India and I had to teach them from scratch. Universities seem to have no idea when it comes to the reality of IT. I don't know what they're teaching but it has no value in the marketplace.

Very true, the rate for the ECDL course was around £2k in my part of the world a couple of years ago, but it was only available to those who were made redundant, not to everyone on JSA. Where I work so many lack even basic IT skills, investing in a few basic courses would be a significant investment for both employer and employee.

This is what happens when you have a tick box mentality - teaching the narrowest parameters to hit targets.

No skill, no idea.

I was bored to tears in my ICT lessons they didn't challenge me at all!
When we actually had a teacher I spent most of my time helping them.
My younger Sister who is 14 has to take the DiDA, which is a complete and utter waste of time introduced by NuLabour so that it could be overseen by cover assistants.

I took an I.C.T GCSE at school, before that we had been given rudimentary lessons on how to use a computer. I knew more about how to use a computer than the teacher (I'm a geek if you couldn't guess). We very quickly learnt that the I.C.T GCSE was more about how to work in an office with a PC. The closest we got to anything to do with computer science was we made some of our own animations, and we only did that because the teacher decided to do it for fun, it wasn't on the curriculum.

They need separate GCSEs, one for working in an office and another for computer science for those of us that wanted it (and those still in education that want to).

Well it is all known ,...that is why there is no Mark Elliot Zuckerberg of uk ....