The problems won’t just emerge in banking, but in cybersecurity and key corporate IT functions – the systems that keep major companies running – according to Jonathan Tate, PwC’s head of technology consulting in the UK. The cyber attacks that have hit TalkTalk and Carphone Warehouse, in which millions of people saw personal details compromised, could pail in significance compared to those that will hit in the future, as cyber-attacks become more common and more sophisticated, and the guardians required to defend against them are stretched. Meanwhile, Businesses trying to take their services and working patterns online and onto smartphones will suffer delays, at the cost of lost sales and inefficient employees. Several factors explain the shortfall, not least a huge increase in demand. The latest jobs report from KPMG and the Recruitment & Employment Confederation puts IT on top of a league table of in-demand jobs, above executives or financial workers. KPMG’s Heath Jackson says that demand for tech workers, particularly in cyber security, surged in December after recent cyber attacks, continuing a hiring boom that has existed for months. But supply is also being affected, as intelligent engineers and tech workers opt to join or found start-ups in tech clusters across the UK. The Tech City phenomenon, while often overhyped, has had a real, damaging effect on the ability of “non-digital” companies to hire IT staff. IT is the boring side of technology: Exciting leaps in imagination are rare, and there are no flashy product launches. Most of the time, people are only interested in it when something has gone wrong: a system has been knocked over, or there’s been a security breach. Given that, it’s hardly a surprise that for young graduates who have the option of building IT systems at a bank or the next Google, it’s rarely a difficult decision. This shortage will boil over in the coming years as a generation of IT workers, who built the systems and databases that still power critical functions, begin to retire. This is especially worrying in finance, where large institutions, which have repeatedly merged and sold off parts of their businesses, have back-end systems that have been hastily thrown together. As those that created them leave the workforce, disasters will be more difficult and take longer to recover from. Companies have responded to the problems with hiring IT workers by outsourcing more work. But having done this, says Tate, many have made poor decisions, found contractors to be inadequate, and moved operations back inside. The alternative is simply to pay more for the best talent, but a swell in demand across the board is making this increasingly expensive. The real answer is better training. More people will have to be encouraged to take degrees in computer science or IT, as well as beginning to learn it at an earlier age. This is starting to happen, but the number of students taking STEM degrees – science, technology, engineering and maths – is tens of thousands below what it needs to be, according to the Social Market Foundation. Companies will also have to spend more on in-work training, given the shortage in graduates who are fully up to the job. If that doesn’t start happening, the UK’s IT crisis is only going to become more worrying. The result of this will be more people at risk from incompetent security measures and vital services failing. Occasional banking outages could be the least of our problems.
The UK is not keeping up with the explosion of information technology, and unless the country addresses its chronic shortages in technology workers, Britain's core industries will be in real trouble. EU estimates that the UK's shortfall in qualified workers was 55,000 in 2015, second only to Germany; by next year it will be the largest shortages in the The European Commission and by 2020 will stand at 171,000. This does not bode well for UK businesses that are trying to move into the digital era, nor the country's security or economy.