De-Skilling: Old Problem, New Industries

According to the Association of Technology Staffing Companies (ATSCO) the recent phenomenon of ‘offshoring’ / outsourcing has created such a situation in the IT Industry. Whilst more strategic and project management roles, remain UK based, the abundance of cheap, technologically skilled labour has filled most entry level positions. In other words, if you aim to join a large IT services provider as an entry level graduate/ programmer you can expect to be doing more project management than coding in C+, Java or writing XML script.

Is this a brain drain or merely the most efficient use of resources? - after all outsourcing is nothing new! However, this trend raises a number of interesting questions. For example, what is the future of IT education, which is closely coupled with business studies? Does the increase in strategic project management and the outsourcing of programming and scripting as a commodity mean that IT education should be more closely aligned with business education? There would appear to be little evidence of this in 11-18 education.

Secondly, what value will the current plethora of IT qualifications have in 5 years time? Remember, the days when typing and word processing was on the curriculum before becoming commoditised? It is one thing to be able to type or program, it is quite another to use the skill effectively for a business purpose.

Thirdly, to what extent can the UK economy prosper as a high cost, high value service innovator, when those core technical IT skills have been lost through the process of outsourcing? It is arguably a big step from the inception of an idea to its implementation. Technical skills provide the bridge. If our workforce has been “de-skilled” through offshoring, does that enterprising idea of wealth generation become a “bridge too far”?