Measures to improve gender and ethnic diversity can help address digital skills shortage, says new report

According to the report (25-page / 330KB PDF), commissioned by the UK government and authored by professors Liz Bacon and Lachlan MacKinnon of the University of Greenwich, current predictions estimate that "there will be a shortfall of 500,000 ICT professionals across Europe by 2020, with the UK as one of the major losers".

However, according to the report, "addressing the gender inequality issue in the ICT profession is an important step towards solving the digital skills deficit", while "addressing diversity issues successfully could have a significant impact on the current pipeline of ICT professionals".

The report highlighted a range of measures that could be implemented.

Potential solutions include encouraging employers to use apprenticeship levy funds to "offer re-training opportunities for adult women who would like to work in technology", and requiring businesses to publish data on workforce diversity and set targets to "promote greater ICT workforce diversity", it said.

According to research by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) and the British Academy of Management, only 6% of managers in the UK come from a minority background.

In a recently published report (44-page / 1.81MB PDF), the bodies urged FTSE100 businesses to publish their strategies to improve the representation of people from Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds in management positions, as well as their targets and progress towards achieving those goals.

Other options to improve BAME representation in the IT profession set out in the Bacon and MacKinnon report included factoring in prospective contractors' workforce diversity when deciding who to award contracts for publicly funded infrastructure projects to. 'Blind' selection processes could also be used during recruitment to mask details such as the "name, gender, educational institute, ethnic background and home address" of candidates during shortlisting for jobs, it said.

Jacey Graham, co-founder of diversity and inclusion consultancy Brook Graham, which is owned by Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said: "The IT sector is one of the sectors which struggles to attract and retain women. Frankly, there is still a lot of work to do ‘upstream’ of the issue in education to develop an interest in young women for STEM subjects and careers."

"Most companies and schools are aware of this and are doing their best, but it is a longer term approach. The male gendered culture in IT can be tackled through awareness raising and use of programmes such as reciprocal mentoring which we have run with some clients in the IT sector," she said.

Beyond measures to improve diversity, the report also said tax breaks could be introduced for businesses that support staff in "lifelong learning" in "high demand subject areas" as a means of helping to bridge the digital skills gap.

The report also backed changes in funding within the higher education sector to incentivise people to complete online courses and e-learning modules to enhance their digital skills by enable them to access funding.

"The current funding model for students is based on 3-4 year long undergraduate programmes, postgraduate programmes over 1-2 years, and some rather inflexible part-time models," the report said. "Making funding available to all eligible students on the basis of credit accumulation, with a maximum number of credits being supported within a lifelong learning window, and repayment associated with elapsed time since credit achievement, would offer the opportunity for far greater flexibility in the provision and take-up of higher education."