Tuesday, February 20, 2024 6:01am
Digital skills are essential to the UK workforce and the onus is on both the government and big tech companies to educate them, says Michelle Donnellan to attract more Gen Z workers to tech jobs I mentioned this in my efforts to do so.
Britain’s technology secretary is pushing ahead with efforts to reskill and upskill young Britons through a series of free “bootcamps” offering training in skills such as cybersecurity, cloud computing and coding.
“Most jobs in any field have a digital component,” Donnellan said. City AM“As technology becomes more intertwined with our lives and the needs of the labor market, every role will require some form of digital skills.”
The campaign to improve Gen Z’s technology skills began in 2022, and the first year resulted in more than half of participants securing direct jobs. But the government is now stepping up its promotional efforts as the UK rapidly approaches its 2030 target for economic growth. Becoming a global technology superpower.
As part of this ambition, the UK government wants to retain more of the successful technology start-ups and scale-ups, which tend to disappear into the US once they reach a certain size. requires more digital skills. matches this demand.
New research published by Barclays Eagle Labs and Beauhurst shows that scale-up companies in the ‘venture stage’ are hungry for technology talent, with this group hiring almost a third of all digital roles. It is said that there is.
“The key message I’ve heard from industry about what’s holding us back to the next level of potential is to make sure we have that skills pipeline, and secondly, to ensure that companies have the next level of potential. It’s about being able to scale up and grow to a level… and we’re reducing the regulatory burden,” Donnellan explained.
When launching the UK Digital Strategy in 2022, the Government established the Digital Skills Council. Council members include representatives from major technology companies such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google.
Mr Donnellan, speaking from Google’s offices in King’s Cross, highlighted the importance of the tech giant’s role in its ambitions for more advanced digital skills. “There needs to be a collective effort in terms of trying to meet the digital skills requirements,” she says.
Katie O’Donovan, director of government affairs and public policy at Google, said: Driving growth across the UK technology sector. ”
But a wave of layoffs in the tech industry could deter Gen Z from taking action. In January alone, about 25,000 employees lost their jobs at about 100 technology companies, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta, according to industry tracker layoffs.fyi.
Addressing the issue, Mr Donnellan said there were “plenty of jobs available” that were “lucrative” and that digital skills were important for other roles outside the tech industry.
According to the latest data from Tech Nation, there were more than 2 million technical vacancies between May 2021 and 2022, out of a total of approximately 15 million vacancies across the economy.
The government aims to upskill 64,000 people through bootcamps by 2024-25 and has earmarked £550m of funding for this purpose.