Bringing IT on within Northern Ireland
27/07/2009
Minister for employment and learning Sir Reg Empey explains why fostering careers in ICT is critical to the ongoing development of Northern Ireland.
At a time of unprecedented economic uncertainty, many businesses are understandably trying to tighten their belts. But I believe that even in the current climate, investment in training must continue if we are to achieve longer-term productivity.
One of the key areas where such investment is crucial is ICT, which is recognised as a priority skills area by my department, and one that has increasing economic significance for Northern Ireland's future prosperity.
As part of our work, we have recognised that not only is investment in ICT skills fundamental, but that we also need to find out what the particular skills are and how to address them at a range of levels. We are now on our way to building that picture and developing those solutions, in partnership with employers.
I turn first to IT user level skills, in other words the information and experience that people need to be able to use new technologies and get the most out of them. The need for the general workforce to have well developed ICT skills was clearly recognised in the Sector Skills Agreement (SSA) for IT: 2007-2010 Action Plan for Northern Ireland. This stated that 'the use of ICT as an Essential Skill is as fundamental as literacy or numeracy; those who lack them will find their private and professional lives limited in the same way that illiteracy impacts lives'.
We have already taken steps to tackle this issue by including ICT as part of our Essential Skills offering. Following a successful pilot, Essential Skills in ICT will be introduced as a third essential skill from 1st August 2009. Through the programme on offer, people will have the chance to get the ICT skills they need to enter and progress in the world of work and to use ICT to enhance their daily lives.
We also continue to demonstrate our commitment to supporting ICT as a sector in its own right, with an increasing focus on the higher level skills needed to move that industry forward. Worth £344m to the Northern Ireland economy each year and employing over 7,500 people, we know that ICT is a sector that is critical to our ongoing development as a region. This continued success relies on a number of key elements, arguably the most significant of which is getting the right people. This is particularly true for the cutting edge software companies, which make up the majority of IT companies operating in Northern Ireland. What these companies tell us they need is a steady flow of highly skilled IT professionals into the industry. Ironically, the number of people pursuing careers in the sector has been steadily decreasing. We are now working with e-skills UK (the Sector Skills Council for Business and Information Technology), Momentum (the ICT Trade Federation in Northern Ireland), and Invest Northern Ireland (the regional enterprise agency) to encourage more young people to study courses such as computer science and software engineering at college and university so that they can become the IT professionals of tomorrow.
Our activities kicked off in 2007, when my department established an ICT Future Skills Action Group chaired by David Mawhinney, Managing Director of a highly successful Northern Ireland-based company – Equiniti ICS. Through the group, the department had the opportunity to discuss with companies and those from a training and education perspective how we could work together to address the immediate skills issues facing the sector.
Our collective intentions were formally presented in an Action Plan, published in June 2008. The plan contains a series of interventions designed to supplement the supply of IT professionals in the short term and raise awareness of what a career in ICT can offer.
One of the first things we did was to more than double the intake to the well respected Software Professional Course. This 35 week graduate conversion course was designed in partnership with industry and is delivered through a number of Area Based Further Education Colleges. Each course contains certain core elements, plus extra provision tailored to meet the needs of specific employers who sign up to offer participants job interviews. We have invested significantly in publicising recruitment to the course and also introduced a brand new training allowance of £120 per week for those who take part. As a result, we now have 97 software engineers in training, to complement the supply from more traditional university routes.
We also recognised the need to get better at forecasting the numbers of graduates and types of skills needed to support the sector. For that reason, my department commissioned e-skills UK to produce a series of six monthly snapshots of the ICT industry here. This regular temperature test of the industry's skills needs will help to establish trends as we move forward.
The first edition of the Snapshot was published recently and contained some interesting findings. Despite the challenges of the economic downturn, the Snapshot showed that IT graduates are still in demand in Northern Ireland, with 62% of ICT companies planning to hire new IT graduates, and a third of companies expecting to recruit IT professionals over the next six months.
Companies who took part in the survey also indicated that they are responding proactively to the downturn. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of ICT companies in NI are planning to develop new services to overcome the current economic downturn, and 53% are developing new products.
The Snapshot will continue to act as a useful barometer, but we also knew we needed to look at this issue over the longer term and plan for the changes that will occur over the next three to five years and beyond. To that end, we have commissioned additional longer range research on higher level skills needs, which will be published later this year. The research will involve one-to-one consultations with major ICT employers, and will also draw on the findings of related reports such as the MATRIX report, which looks at how Northern Ireland's economy can develop through a number of growth hi-tech sectors.
I look forward to the completion of the research as it will give us some new areas of focus. One that we are already very aware of is the issue of career attractiveness.
Lessons learned by e-skills UK through their experience in Great Britain, and focus group work we have carried out in Northern Ireland showed that although young people enjoy using technology, many of them have never considered a career in ICT. We also know that their parents don't have enough information about the benefits associated with careers in the sector. We want that to change and have recently introduced a Career Attractiveness campaign for the ICT sector in Northern Ireland, which clearly sets out the importance of ICT and what can be gained from following a career in this sector.
Since September last year, each of the partners in this process has been working hard to reach young people and those they talk to about their future careers, in a variety of ways. During the autumn, the campaign involved a series of events – interactive school workshops, university open days, and activities to engage careers teachers and advisers. In January this year, we launched a brand new website dedicated to ICT careers in Northern Ireland and a widespread media campaign under the theme, 'Bring IT On'.
Through all these activities, and in particular the website (
www.bringitonni.info), young people are encouraged to find out more about careers paths in the sector, and their advisers have access to the most up-to-date and relevant information to help in this process.
These are indeed difficult times, but I think that it is indicative of the strength of this sector that during one week recently when the news headlines were dominated with job cuts, we saw two significant expansion announcements by ICT companies in Northern Ireland involving over 100 new highly skilled graduate jobs.
What encouraged me most were the comments from the chief executive of one of the companies involved. When asked by an interviewer why he had chosen Belfast for expansion, he explained that there were very few places in the world with the ICT talent pool that we have here.
We want to build on that success and see many more companies 'Bringing IT On' within Northern Ireland.
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