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Professional Development Programme
The challenge
The impact of globalisation
The impact of globalisation means that new IT professionals must progress rapidly to higher level roles without access to the traditional 'entry level' jobs that would help them to build their skills and experience.
Indeed, traditional 'entry level' IT roles are increasingly sourced offshore or disappearing due to advances in technology.
As a consequence, the growing volume of IT professional roles in the UK is focused on high skill, customer-facing areas such as project management, business analysis and solutions design.
New graduates entering the sector have to 'leap frog' into roles which might normally require several years' professional experience.
In addition, all new graduates embarking on an IT professional career have further development needs - for example, in real-world business understanding or job-specific skills. Also, graduates entering IT professional roles come from both IT (46%) and non-IT (54%) backgrounds.
In response to all these factors, the IT Professional Development Programme will enable new IT professionals to rapidly build a strong foundation of competence in the early years of their career.
Last modified: 01 Nov 2007
Background Data
- 58% of the UK’s IT professionals are qualified to graduate level or higher.
- Around one in five employers say gaps in technical skills (18%) and communications skills (13%) are reasons for not employing new graduates into ICT roles.
- Around four in ten (38 – 40%) employers consider the level of business, non-technical and interpersonal skills of new recruits to be below company requirements.
- Around 150,000 people a year are recruited into the sector.