Good intentions are not enough to bridge the tech skills gap
Russ Shaw, founder of Tech London Advocates and Global Tech Advocates tells Computing why he's spent the last decade advocating for UK tech to realise its potential, and why it's time to walk the talk on diversity, equity and inclusion.
Russ Shaw set up Tech London Advocates, now a network of more than 14,000 tech leaders, entrepreneurs in London, across the UK and in over 70 countries worldwide, back in 2013. Shaw was prompted to set up the organisation after meeting an adviser to the then Prime Minister David Cameron and then London Mayor Boris Johnson.
"At that time, the UK Government and City Hall were really focused on getting behind this emerging London tech ecosystem. I wanted to give something back to tech. I wanted to bring together a diverse group of tech leaders largely with a private sector focus, to get behind, promote and support the start-ups and scale-ups that were emerging in London, and to act as an independent grassroots voice to media, to government and to key stakeholders. We needed to communicate the good things that were happening but also the challenges that we were experiencing."
Going global
Everybody involved in this community volunteers their time, including Shaw who works pro bono. The scale and speed of growth of the community he founded surprised him.
"One of the things that happened soon after we launched, which I wasn't expecting was we started to set up working groups where like-minded advocates could come together and focus on themes, tech verticals, key topics etc. The first group that we launched was an immigration working group, then an education group formed followed by women in tech."
Those early working groups multiplied into a rich array including initiatives such as circular economy, tech for disability, Black women in tech and future of work. More vertically focused groups include fintech, healthtech and web3 and groups focused by geography seek to connect London tech ecosystems to countries and geographies such as Africa, Korea and Latin America.
Shaw, and TLA are also founding partners of London Tech Week, the first of which took place in 2014 and now brings together annually thousands of tech leaders, founders , investors and rising stars.
Shaw extended the concept of Tech London Advocates into a model with global reach by licensing his brand, IP, and operating principles for a minimal sum and then working with groups to get to the point of launch and grow their communities. Global Tech Advocates, in addition to a London group, has a further five groups covering UK regions, and numerous groups across Europe, Middle East, Asia Pacific and Indo Pacific and is launching its first group in Africa later this year.
Diversity of opportunity
Diversity and Inclusion is at the heart of TLA and GTA. Earlier this year, the organisations jointly published a Tech for Diversity report which served as a warning that the incredible potential of UK tech within the global tech landscape will only be realised with improved equity, inclusion and diversity of talent. The report also made the point that the responsibility for building this diverse and sustainable future lay firmly at the door of the tech sector.
The desperate and growing deficit in skills is strongly connected to the stubbornly persistent ethnic, gender and socioeconomic homogeneity of UK tech. As a consequence of this, the TLA Immigration Group have advocated for tech during policy discussions on immigration.
"We speak out a lot about the importance of visas and immigration," explains Shaw. "We took the Migration Advisory Committee a few years ago on a tech tour to get them to look at what's going on in tech, and we worked with them to get a number of jobs on the shortage occupation list. We provided a lot of input on the Global Talent visa and Scale-Up visa. There's also a High Performing Individual visa where if have a qualification from certain universities around the world, you can stay for at least 2 years. We have 60 or 70 advocates in that group, many of which are immigration lawyers.
"We will occasionally provide calls for evidence, although we're not a think tank, but when we need to kind of make real and bring in people who are having issues and challenges, that's the role we play. Because we're independent, we're not government funded, so if we don't agree with the government we will speak out."
Shaw cites as an example of this the way that TLA spoke out against the cap imposed on the Tier 2, skilled migrant visas which resulted in lots of tech talent being squeezed out of the UK during the duration of the cap as the NHS took up the vast majority of the visa slots. He continues to advocate for global tech talent, arguing against the Kafkaesque system that people coming to the UK on Global Talent visas have to navigate. At present, there isn't even a Home Office portal available for people applying for Global Talent visas to check basic details about the status of their applications. Until problems like this are ironed out, Global Britain will remain more slogan than reality.
"We've applauded them on the visas," says Shaw, "but we have to get that message out and the support mechanisms in place. The new government needs to address that and take that very seriously because it's a missed opportunity. All the tech hubs around the world are struggling to get talent. We have over 100,000 tech vacancies in the UK at the moment. We need to fill it with diverse talent and overseas talent, and I'm not even sure that will be enough to close the gap."
Shaw is a passionate advocate for diversity in all forms. He admits to a degree of frustration that the industry collectively claims to understand that ethnic, gender, neuro and socioeconomic homogeneity is hampering the potential of the UK tech sector to grow and yet seems incredibly slow to implement the necessary changes.
"As a grassroots organisation our focus is on who's walking the talk. I still see a lot of senior executives and boards say they're doing this and doing that but if you go into their organisations there's still a lot of ‘yeah but.' I sense it's starting to happen but it isn't happening fast enough."
As Computing has argued before, hiring diverse talent is really only the beginning. In order to nurture, retain and grow that talent, many organisations have to make fundamental changes to their culture. It isn't easy but the reward can be a tech sector that truly is a global leader.