IT and telecommunications sector struggling to fill job vacancies

Graduates don’t have the necessary skills to fill the increasing amount of graduate jobs in the IT and telecommunications sector

Computing graduates are diminishing, yet graduate job vacancies in this area are increasing and currently there is a need for an additional 500,000 workers. Even at a time when there are 83 graduates applying for each single job vacancy, graduate recruiters are struggling to fill the vacancies in these sectors according to a report by e-skills UK.

Students and recent graduates who have the required skills and are the main source for recruitment in the sectors are shunning IT in favour of higher paying sectors such as financial services and energy.

More worryingly the amount of applicants to IT related degrees has dropped by 44% since 2001, and in schools the number of computing A-levels taken has declined by 60% since 2003.

Kevin Streater, executive director for IT and telecoms at the Open University. “I was talking to one of the senior technical directors at Hewlett Packard recently, who said he had 300 highly paid jobs he couldn’t fill, because they didn’t have the people applying with the right skills,”

“The Open University’s engagement with the industry has highlighted a perceived lack of business acumen among those coming out of education, and an inability to put technical skills to use in a work setting. Our new degrees are designed to tackle these two major issues. There is a joint degree that allows candidates to study IT alongside commercial subjects, improving the business acumen of graduates, as well as a single award that provides students with clear paths to specific IT roles, giving them more specialised skills.”

So many graduates are currently unemployed, and with tuition fee increases many graduates will be looking at certain sectors that are in short supply so they can obtain a graduate role upon graduating. Therefore IT related degrees should be increasing in popularity.

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