SCOTTISH companies will have to invest "significantly" and at earlier stages of education to help alleviate an IT skills shortage, a technology executive will say today.
Maggie Morrison has been working for more than 18 months recruiting dozens of people into CGI’s open source software hub in Glasgow.
There are now 60 people working there with an expectation for that to reach 100 by the end of the year.
But Ms Morrison, who has also worked from Hewlett Packard, Cisco, 3Com and Cabletron, is scheduled to tell the Civil Service Live conference in Edinburgh today that while there is a decent talent base in Scotland not enough young people are being produced with the right mix of IT skills.
While she would like better collaboration between education, government and industry she believes businesses must start to invest greater sums in talent from earlier ages.
She will say: “Across Europe 100,000 [IT] jobs are being created every year. These are highly skilled, highly paid jobs and yet in Scotland thousands of vacancies remain unfilled annually because of a skills gap. How have we allowed this to happen?”
CGI’s business development director also cites fewer women entering and then staying in the sector as a major problem.
She will tell the conference: “The number of young people entering the industry is dropping and there is a significant gender imbalance with fewer women choosing IT as a career and for those who do retention is an issue.”
Ms Morrison believes greater work based learning programmes in schools, introducing young children to coding and computer language and also making apprenticeships more attractive would help to start alleviate the problems in the short and long term.
As well as CGI, a Canadian firm, the likes of JP Morgan, Skyscanner, FanDuel, Lockheed Martin and Think Analytics have been recruiting heavily for software engineers and developers in Scotland in recent years.
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