Digital Careers in south west England.

This week we have read two interesting reports around digital careers, and thought we should share some headlines with you.

The first was the 2018 Tech Nation Report which captures the strength, depth and breadth of digital tech activity in the UK – a global tech leader.  Between 2014 and 2017 employment in the digital technology sector increased by 13.2%, and jobs requiring digital tech skills command higher salaries on average than non-digital jobs. Digital tech jobs are those that require expertise such as software developers or engineers.

Employer demand for digital tech skills is increasing. Non-digital tech companies are becoming more reliant on digital tech workers, as tech pervades every business and new forms of work evolve.

We are definitely seeing an increase in our region from employers across the board for digital tech skills, and we are certainly seeing a salary premium being required to attract new graduate talent with digital skills.

Headlines from this year’s report for our area include:

• Bristol is the UK #1 digital tech productivity powerhouse at £320k turnover per worker
• Jobs in digital tech in Bournemouth are up 25%, and in Exeter are up 47% from 2014 to 2017
• In Southampton, the £2.1bn digital tech business turnover is up 41% from 2014 to 2017, and in Truro & Redruth turnover is up by 32% in the same period.

We provide a summary of the key facts and figures by city area for our region at the bottom of this article.

The second report, Language Matters, by the Tech Partnership was looking at the language used by students, educators and employers in digital tech. There is a clear gap in language and a need to bridge it. Without an improved understanding or common language it is also difficult to articulate well the varied and rewarding digital career opportunities available in ways that school pupils and graduates fully understand.

Employers across all industries are struggling to meet their needs for digital skills. 52% of UK businesses in the digital industry report ‘hard to fill’ vacancies. Some of this is down to a miscommunication of what roles actually are.

There is a clear difference between the well-established language of academia for degree programme titles – in particular “Computer Science” and “Computing” – and the language of industry, which rarely uses these terms in job adverts, with only 10% and 5% of usage in IT-related job adverts respectively.

The report’s recommendations include:

• Employers not trying to seek too many highly specific requirements from undergraduates in their recruitment advertising, focusing more on the skills and behaviours they seek for specific roles and outlining the type of work recruited individuals will be doing once trained and established.
• Students learning through employers and alumni about the lexicon of industry ahead of graduation and taking an active interest in the wider range of roles beyond programming that a career in IT increasingly offers.

So where does this leave us?

We have a growing number of digital tech jobs in the region, and an urgent need to better articulate what those jobs are to attract new talent into careers in the sector.

So we throw down the challenge to south west employers to better articulate in their job adverts what the roles are really about, and what skills they really need. This includes making job titles more understandable.

And we throw down the challenge to our students and graduates to embrace the opportunities in the region to build their careers here.

Our role here at Gradsouthwest is to continue to link the two together – making digital job adverts more visible in the region to graduates wanting to work here; and making the range of roles available more transparent to students so that they know they can build a career in south west England.

2017 Data

Note: Digital tech jobs – includes all people working in digital tech occupations, irrespective of the industry. For example, a software developer working in a retail company. Jobs in digital tech  – includes all people working in digital tech industries, including non-digital jobs. For example, an accountant working in a web development firm.

Further Reading:

https://technation.io/insights/report-2018/

http://www.tpdegrees.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/LanguageMatters-15May2018-final.pdf