In the Press: Supporting CAS, PASC = Skills Doublethink, PQA...

It's amazing how busy you can get when you are no longer working! But I'm now on top of the post-work arrangements and getting ready to travel the world in mid-January. So now would be a good time to review and catch up on press coverage I've been involved in over the last few months.

The first is an article in ComputerWorldUK that I'm an occasional contributor to. It's a call to support the excellent Computing at School group.

http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/management-briefing/2011/10/eric-schmidt-stated-the-problem-heres-how-we-can-fix-it/index.htm

There's little I can add to this article, except to reaffirm that supporting education is one of the most important things that the IT profession can do to secure its long-term future. Computing at School needs and deserves our full support.

The second was a response to the Public Accounts Select Committee (PASC) report on waste and overspend in public-sector IT. I wrote a byline article for PublicTechnology.net.

http://www.publictechnology.net/sector/central-gov/viewpoint-do-we-get-government-ict-suppliers-we-deserve

In the context of the PASC report I was also quoted in the following article making broadly similar points.

http://news.techeye.net/business/government-it-cartel-slammed

One reoccurring theme is that the public sector needs to up-skill its IT functions at the mid-career level. In this regard the Master of Information Leadership is clearly of its time. However, until I see proper investment in this area, I doubt we can take any claims of action on this problem seriously. Complaining about but not investing in your workforce is doublethink, irrespective of whether it is in the private or public sectors.

NB. I think that assuming that the private sector is immune from these issues of waste, weak talent management or mal-investment would be a mistake.

Third I had the pleasure of being invited to blog for the Guardian Higher Education Network on Post-Qualification Admissions (i.e. applying to UCAS after A-level results are known).


http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2011/sep/27/post-qualification-applications-applying-university

One point I was like to add is that I support PQA not because it is the easy or convenient thing to do, but because it is the right thing to do for applicants. The moral dimension of the role of universities is an under-considered aspect of the admissions narrative, but essential to their long-term sustainability.

I was also mentioned in the launch of City's undergraduate scholarships that I'm sure will help attract more talented students to their computing undergraduate programme; something that I am immensely proud to have been involved with.

http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/careers/3311390/city-university-offers-computing-scholarships-for-undergraduates/

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/enterprise/3311734/city-university-offers-computing-scholarships-for-undergraduates/

I've had a great time doing press while at City University London and especially working with the consummately professional Luke Nava, the School of Informatics' press officer.

Any press from now on will be in a private capacity or for a future job. Watch this space.

What does the wage data tell us about IT skills?

One of the underlying narratives of the last decade is the repositioning of the UK IT industry towards high-value IT work and off-shoring more routine, low-value work.

Advertised IT salaries as of 29 March 2010 (old.jobstats.co.uk)

As you can see wages for the mid-to-high end are in fact increasing (indicating increased demand). The low end is static and with a drop in advertised vacancies and increased moves to off-shoring indicates reduced demand. This is backed up by more detailed analysis in recent e-skills UK reports.

I put this up at careers events to impress on the audience (1) a realistic idea of the salary position and (2) that the low-end has been squeezed to the extent that mediocre simply doesn't cut it anymore. The story of an uncle who blagged a well-paid job in IT in the 80's-90's is moving into the realm of myth and legend.

The problem is the outside world thinks that the IT job market is help-desk and getting kit to work: not what IT professionals actually do. The irony is that the TV programme 'The IT crowd' should have been called 'The IT crowd who had their roles off-shored 10 years ago'.  

Even if some of the lower wage end is 'graduate trainee', there seems to be increasingly fewer positions for sub-degree entry (especially in a time of higher than usual graduate unemployment). So are we offering large numbers of IT 'vocational' qualifications in schools when there isn't a job market to absorb them? That is assuming that what is taught is relevant to even an IT, which isn't the case in reality (it teaches use of IT). Has the IT job market has effectively become a graduate entry market? Do we need to recognise this in policy, e.g. focus on intellectual development such as 'computational thinking', consider work-related focus largely as a motivator, assume that HE is the majority destination for post 16 learners in qualification design?

Or is the data hiding a different dynamic in SMEs, so we are are seeing the more visible behaviour of the corporate employers? Their recruitment behaviour for graduates differs in my experience.

The movement to a graduate discipline may be complete unless the next few years sees companies recruiting talented BTEC/A-level students from college directly and developing their IT trainees themselves (which used to be more common 30-40 years ago, say in accountancy and even in chemistry). Watch and see...

Press Update...

Despite the pause in blogging, I've been quite active in talking to the IT press on my interest in IT education and skills. See below (in no particular order)...

• A year in IT education - Computing

• A-level results mark 'worrying trend' for IT sector - Computer Weekly

• IT education in China is eclipsing UK efforts - Computing 

• IT degree upsurge a temporary reprieve - Computing

• IT vacancies rise in Q3 2010 - is now the time to hire? - Computer Weekly

• Funding cuts to university threaten IT skills shortages, say experts - Computerworld UK

• A-level results highlight UK's IT skills gap - Computer Weekly

The Master of Information Leadership also gained coverage as a CIONet Magazine Article. My colleague David Chan as also been active - but that will doubtless come up later.

Recent Press Coverage

I've been mentioned in a number of press articles following the recent announcement of a Royal Society investigation into IT teaching in schools.

• Coding skills should be basic measure of computer literacy for children

• BCS launches videos to inspire future IT professionals

• BCS videos hope to create future CIOs

• Companies should promote IT careers 'with work experience'

I'll be writing more on the Royal Society investigation in later postings.

Computer Science Unplugged - The Show

To start off a series of post on promoting computing in schools, this video shows an entertaining way to introduce computer science to school students. It's given me a few ideas.

For more details of the initiative that gave rise to this see CS Unplugged. Worth a look.



There will be more of these videos posted in the future. Some of them are quite good, others not.

Public Sector CIO Pay: Are we comparing like with like...?

There has been something of a moral panic regarding the pay of some senior civil servants, including some government CIOs getting paid more than the Prime Minister (who appears to have been given a pay cut). I'm not about to make moral or value judgements - this is not the place.

The real issue for me is whether we are comparing like for like. In executive recruitment, you need to consider the whole reward package: pay, perks, use of hotels/residences, memberships, pensions... For example, the PM gets the free use of two 'grace and favour' residences (No. 10 and Chequers) plus associated maintainence, cleaners, servants. I somehow doubt this is matched by the civil service CIOs.

The above applies to making comparisons with private sector peer CIOs too. We also then need to consider the benefits side, i.e. what they deliver. At that point we can start to look at costs and benefits somewhat more objectively, before discussing the value judgements.

All this reminds me of comparisons made routinely in the press about goods being cheaper in the US than in the UK (currently fluctuations aside). These claims don't always stand up to scruitiny as they invariably quote US prices excluding sales tax but UK prices including VAT and/or compare US out of town prices with central London prices. But hey, don't let the facts get in the way of a good story!..:-)

A great site: jobstats.co.uk

In my professional life I try to make sense of what's going on in the IT industry. There's a lot of data one can use (for example the excellent quarterly e-skills Bulletin and ICT Inquiry), but here's a site from an IT professional doing it himself. Nick Wells runs a website - www.jobstats.co.uk - that analyses the text of published IT job advertisements on the internet and strips out the information about skills, locations and pay rates (though I have to thank my colleague Maggie Cooper for drawing this site to my attention originally).

A key graph from jobstats is below. The effect on IT vacancies of the dot-com boom and bust is clear for this. It also appears that the job market has largely recovered beyond pre-dot-com levels. Of course, this buoyancy begs a question: if the job prospects seem so good, why have applications for computing degrees not recovered in line with the job market?

Advertised IT vacancies as of 31 July 2007 (www.jobstats.co.uk)

I've used this a lot when analysing the IT job market. Though it appears rough and ready, you'd be surprised how similar the process behind some 'official' figures can be (measurement of economic factors such as productivity is quite difficult in practice). I doubt that, qualitatively at least, these figures are too far off from the reality.

Anyway, have a look. You may be surprised what you find...

A slow knee jerk (computing student retention)

I'd like to introduce David Evan's Unqualified Remarks blog on the BCS website. It's a recent addition to the blogsphere, and already has a number of interesting, informed and thought-provoking posts. I expect that that I'll be linking to his posts - of course I may not agree all of the time!

One post that I thought was interesting was 'A quick knee-jerk on computing drop-outs'. It speculates from a Computing article that reports on the National Audit Office's report on graduate retention. In short Maths & Computing degrees have the lowest retention and completion rates (I don't like the term 'drop-out' - sounds like blaming the students). His speculations broadly were around three points.

1. ICT as taught in schools is a poor fit to that in universities - more on that later...
   
2. A maths/numerical/science background is probably more relevant to a computing degree than school ICT - no argument there, but perhaps this is worth unpacking further in future posts.
3. That since applications have dropped in recent years (since 2001, by almost half) universities are taking in students with lower A-level grades.

David did remark that he did not have research data to hand. Thankfully, there is some evidence base around computing retention. As head of a computing department you'd imagine I'd be looking at this closely - and you'd be right. There are some studies that I do have to hand that are relevant to David's argument, and I'd like to share them with you.

Let us start with the speculation around whether the drop in applications for computing degrees since 2001 has lead to poorer-quality students getting in.

I have taken a graph from the Developing the Future 2007 report that compares the performance of applicants for computing degrees to the overall pool of applicants (I assume that this is based on HESA data). As we can see there has not been a drop in the performance of computing applicants.


I admit that this is a finding that I find somewhat surprising as anecdotally I have heard that drops in entrance requirements have occurred (and given the drop in applications you would have expected this).

In any case there is a clear difference in ability between the average performance of all university applicants (around the BBB level), and that of computing applicants (around the CCC mark). So David may well be right about lower grades on entry, but it wasn't the recruitment crash that caused it.

What should be of real concern is that computing is losing ground - the gap in performance is getting wider year-on-year!

NB. I should take the opportunity to say that City has not followed the national computing recruitment trends - we are one of the minority of computing departments to have maintained both student numbers and quality since 2001. But it is fair to say that a lot of computing departments in the UK are under pressure. I'll be posting on this soon, I hope.

Now, onto what is taught in schools. I doubt that I could find any computing admissions tutor that is happy with ICT teaching in schools. To be frank, I find the syllabus of the BTEC National (a vocational qualification) more relevant to studying computing at university than A-level ICT since it focuses on technical issues. But back to the evidence base. The perception of students in schools and colleges has been studied, two relevant ones are:

1. Alison Mitchell et al, ‘Computing Science at University: what do pupils in Scottish schools think about it?’. Presentation at the Higher Education Academy Workshop on Progression, Retention & Recruitment, Edinburgh 2005.
2. Gillian Lovegrove and Anna Round, Report on the HEFCE-funded initiative ‘IT Professionals in Education, Increasing the Supply'. Newcastle/London, November 2005 and January 2006.

They concur with David's suspicions. What is clear from these studies is that students find ICT in schools to be unchallenging and a poor indicator of the challenging and rewarding careers available in the IT industry (or what a degree involves). It also seems to put off the more able students, and attract the less able - clearly not what we want. These studies deserve further analysis - there's a lot to discuss there.

As a final note David did mention that the ICT syllabus problem was (apparently) less in Scotland (though the Scottish study does seem to have very similar responses to the English studies of school attitudes). I'm familiar with the Scottish education system (having lived there for five years), but I've never looked at their school teaching of ICT in detail. But if readers can shed light on this claim, I'd be most interested.

PS. Of course, it goes without saying if you can throw any further light on the above issues - please post on my profile.

Developing the Future (and why I started blogging)

One of the highlights of my year and a major reason for sparking my interest in how higher education interacts with the IT industry is my work contributing to the Developing the Future 2007 (DtF 2007) report that was published in May on behalf of City University jointly with Microsoft, the BCS and Intellect.

DtF 2007 (and the previous 2006 report) covered a lot of issues relevant to how universities interact with the IT industry. Both reports for example drew attention to the crisis in recruiting computing students. Some of the issues I'll be blogging about will be based on background research that I did for DtF that did not get used in the report (or at least not in full).

I'm blogging because I think these issues are important, and writing about them should help me get some of my nascent ideas straight. Also, not all the coverage out there is what I would call 'evidence based'. Some is definitely written with an agenda or from prejudice. I'd like to respond to that with evidence - a lot is there if you wish to look.

Not all of the posts will be expansions of DtF 2007 - I also aim to respond to the discussions in the media! That said, both reports do cover issues I'm interested in. Those new to issues around the IT industry, skills, innovation and education would be well advised to read them.

Both reports are also very timely in regards to government policy. The UK government is very strongly drawn to the idea that their intervention in 'skills' will have a clear economic impact. And if you think that skills will not be a big policy issue, then think again. The Leitch report on skills was driven by the treasury - the chancellor is now the Prime Minister - you do the math!

Of course, not everyone thinks that this will work - Alison Wolf is a notable example in her book 'Does Education Matter?'. That said, few would dispute that the state can make things harder, so its (in)actions are not without consequence. The truth as always somewhere in the middle - 'where' being the key question But more on that for later posts.