IT Essentials : Innovation demands soft skills

The tech skills gap is about more than the supply of STEM graduates

If we want to relearn how to innovate in this country, employers should think about how they encourage the development of soft skills.

My inbox has been filling up since A-levels results day last week with commentary, most of it very positive, about the increasing proportion of students opting for STEM subjects, including computing.

More than one of these messages refers to the tech skills gap. Surely with more young people opting to study STEM subjects in greater depth we stand a chance of developing the skills we need to innovate, shape and lead the digital future?

The problem with this analysis is the nature of the skills gap. It isn't uniform. Yes, there are huge amounts of unfilled vacancies for cybersecurity analysts, for cloud and machine learning skills, But entry level positions in front end software development are often vastly oversubscribed, with low code/no code tools, greater automation, increased international competition and the vast scale of the tech redundancies of the last 18 months working together to create reduced supply of entry level positions and a big increase in the labour pool.

The market for developers becomes more favourable to the developer a few years into their career, provided they or their employer have invested in their ongoing upskilling, but the evidence suggests that the rungs of a tech career ladder are moving further apart. It's harder to develop the experience needed for promotion when lower order tasks are increasingly becoming automated.

However, technical skills are only part of the puzzle.

How much do we really want to innovate?

That companies must innovate, or die isn't controversial, but David Germain who leads IT at QBE Insurance, speaking to my colleague Tom Allen recently, questioned our collective appetite for innovation.

"We need to want to innovate again in this country...I sometimes find we make it difficult for people [to do that]. Everything's against you to want to innovate and engineer and create technology services and create an ecosystem that's vibrant."

Germain's view is that it will take a blend of financial, cultural, academic and commercial action, some of which can be supported by government to make this happen.

The cultural and academic parts of this analysis are linked. At a Downing Street roundtable that I participated in last year, a delegate representing Big Tech AI development said that he'd employed as many social science and humanities graduates as computer science ones.

There's a strong argument to suggest that the last governments positioning of arts and humanities studies as an expensive waste of time was mistaken. Nobody is arguing that we want fewer STEM graduates, but other avenues of study are valuable in the quest for innovation because they help people to develop the skills often described as "soft" skills – and these are the skills that employers continually bemoan the lack of.

Why are skills in critical thinking, empathy, reflection, communication and collaboration, all of which must be present for innovation to thrive, in such short supply? If part of the answer lies in academia and government policy, the larger cultural issue is arguably the responsibility of employers themselves.

Many tech employers claim to value "soft" skills, but the industry has a lamentable track record in rewarding the people that have them – often (but by no means exclusively) women. How many tech leaders openly demonstrate empathy, the ability to reflect honestly on their own strengths and weaknesses and an ability to collaborate? In some of the tech businesses I worked at earlier in my career, anyone exhibiting those sorts of skills was punished for it. Empathy and reflection would be interpreted as a lack of confidence. Critical thinking was perceived as negativity and collaboration just meant someone else taking credit for your ideas.

Lots of today's tech leaders formed their template of what a successful leader looks like in this era and it isn't helping us, collectively, to innovate in the way that David Germain describes.

The "tech skills gap" is often presented as a relatively straightforward supply and demand issue which can be fixed by increasing the pipeline of young people with STEM skills. It's an intuitive narrative which is made more attractive for today's leaders because it makes it fundamentally someone else's problem.

But reducing the skills gap and recovering our desire and ability to innovate is more than a simple question of supply and demand. As AI continues to narrow entry points into tech careers, and change the nature of those careers, a renewed focus on the skills which make us human would be welcome.

And stop calling them soft.

Recommended Reads:

Tom Allen's full interview with David Germain of QBE Insurance is available to read here. Tom also talked with Ripe Insurance CIO Andrew Harrington about the extent to which AI is disrupting the insurance industry.

John Leonard has continued his coverage of US legal judgements which could have global implications with a story about the upholding of class action copyright against AI image generators.

Almost as important is the trial of a new, iphone and AI enhanced VAR, which the Premier League is trialling as the new season kicks off.