EURIM Information Society Workforce Skills Working Group

The focus of UK education and training policy over that past forty years has been on first entry education, schools-to-university and remedial education/training for the socially excluded. The need to maintain and update the skills of those in the workforce and to enable them to acquire and demonstrate new skills as demand changes has not been a priority. We now face the consequences. The aim of this group is to create and maintain globally competitive workforce skills at all levels, from technical and linguistic competence through system specification, development, integration and operation to product and service research, design, development and implementation. That requires a “politically challenging” change of focus.

Introduction, Objectives and Strategy

Work Programme for 2010 and Forthcoming Meetings

Recent Meetings

Group Outputs (Papers and Briefings)

Other Relevant Documents & Links

Members Page – for meeting details, minutes, working drafts, and additional group information

Previous work programme for this group

Introduction, Objectives and Strategy

This group builds on many years of work on IT Skills needs and on Lifelong Learning networks, from “Re-skilling Europe for the Information Society” (1997), through “E-Skills Summits” in 2001 and 2002 and responses to a whole slew of consultations – often repeating the same questions every other year or even in parallel from different agencies. But apart from the Millennium Bug-busters Programme, updating the skills of the existing workforce has been outside departmental priorities since the 1980s.

Meanwhile the skills of those currently working in the UK ICT industry atrophy, except for those who are lucky enough to work for employers who have invested in their own staff instead of outsourcing. There are also problems with the quality and quantity of new entrants with neglect of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, including Computer Science) skills base.

UK colleges and universities need to be able to exploit the growth of global, modular, lifelong learning and continuous professional developments networks as a major revenue stream, that will reduce dependence on public funding and better enable them to keep abreast of the waves of change, with world class research and teaching in new technologies, as they emerge and transition from laboratory to market.

Objective
To create and maintain a globally competitive workforce at all levels, from basic technical and linguistic competence through system specification, development, integration and operation to product and service research, design, development and implementation, using the need to ensure world class (including security and resilience) communications infrastructures for the 2012 onwards (beginning with the Olympic “challenge”) to expedite progress.

Strategy
Parliamentary and Political: to work with bodies like the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing, the Relevant Sector Skills Councils, Professional bodies and employers to interest a cadre of MPs who will support action to reduce the after-tax cost of training and enable colleges and universities to be centres of lifelong learning not just first entry education, with the flexibility to pursue alternative sources for that which is outside current government priorities.

Industrial and Professional: to use current and emerging skills crises, such as that for electronic security skills, to bring together a critical mass of employers (including public sector) and suppliers (including colleges, universities, recruitment agencies etc.) to secure effective action, including removal of the organisational and fiscal constraints that have prevented this in the past.

Group Outputs (Papers and Briefings)

Date	Description
May 10	The Crisis for UK HE Computing & the Knowledge Economy (draft for discussion only)
Outputs prior to 2008

Other Relevant Documents and Links