IT skills shortage and higher education: don't skimp on basic skills!

A good knowledge of mathematics and other classic engineering subjects is important for the IT workers of the future, combined with the ability to apply them in a complex world. This was one of the messages from Monday's breakfast seminar at Almega in Gothenburg, where representatives of IT companies, academia and politics gave their views on how higher education can help to remedy the shortage of IT skills that exists not only in the IT and telecom sector, but in the business community in general.

I opened the seminar with a summary of the report on the IT skills shortage that we at IT&Telekomföretagen presented in spring 2015. I concluded with the three proposals that deal specifically with what efforts should be made in connection with academic education:

• Weigh in on the wider impact of digitization, for example on the most appropriate forms of delivering higher education given the new digital tools available.
• Facilitating the transition from education to work, through closer cooperation with companies.
• Make even more elaborate efforts to address the gender imbalance in IT education

As a fourth point, I also had further investments in higher vocational education, but as YH is a theme we will return to in a seminar later this fall, I chose not to highlight it specifically.

However, the slide in my presentation that most speakers related to was the one below, which describes the demand for the main IT job roles, while showing the importance of mastering, to varying degrees, the technical, business and user aspects of IT (the full set of slides can be found at the bottom here).

Johan Lassing, CEO of signal processing and communication systems company Qamcom Technology, began his presentation by highlighting the importance of ensuring that all those in higher technical education really learn the basics of mathematics and physics. "The world is full of hidden mathematics," he said, referring, among other things, to the logarithms found in computer games. The problems and even the solutions that IT companies are working on are complex and difficult to understand, so it is particularly important to master the basics.

Jette Gustafsson from IBM, for her part, emphasized the importance of young people starting to work with real problems at an early age, and gave the example of the Next Up and Tekniksprånget initiatives in which IBM is involved. Through real-life problem solving, young people also see the benefits of IT solutions at an early age, which is an important step in getting more girls into the IT field. Jette's company colleague Johan Risberg agreed with Johan's point about mastering the classic engineering subjects, and added that IBM likes to see that employees have two educations, to ensure a broad competence.

Jette Gustafsson, IBM, Johan Magnusson, Swedish Center for Digital Innovation and Lena Peterson, Chalmers

The academy was represented by the third speaker of the seminar, Johan Magnusson from the Swedish Center for Digital Innovation at the University of Gothenburg, and Lena Peterson, Head of Education at Chalmers. Johan Magnusson took on board the company representatives' views on sticking to the basic knowledge, but added that in IT education it should also be clear what the knowledge will be used for. "What do you add?" is the rhetorical question that IT students need to work on, and the university's bachelor's degree programs in IT are therefore being redesigned to include elements of other subjects, including economics. When it came to collaboration with working life, Johan highlighted the master's and assignment-level courses in digital leadership offered by the university (with a great deal of interest even outside the circle of IT / technology companies, note), as well as the departmental council where the university coordinates with IT company representatives on course content, etc.

Lena Peterson emphasized the need for more resources for undergraduate education, which is relatively small (27%) in relation to research investment, and that research should also have a higher element of ICT. Lena agreed that investing in more girls is always an important item on the agenda, but thought that this discussion should be balanced with a discussion of what the boys should do instead, that parallel efforts need to be made towards the programs - nursing education, for example - which have an equally disproportionately small proportion of boys, which is not talked about as much.

The seminar ended with a question and answer session with the two Gothenburg politicians, MPs Johan Büser (S, and the fourth Johan of the seminar) and Camilla Waltersson Grönwall (M). As education policy spokesperson for the M party, Camilla advocated for the increased investments in mathematics that the party has pushed, as well as the IT strategy for schools presented by the Alliance and adopted by the current government. Johan Büser highlighted the increased investments in higher vocational education that the government has made and intends to continue to make, and that they will take on board the descriptions and proposals that the IT&Telecom companies' report points to (you are welcome, I say!).

The breakfast seminar was organized in collaboration between Business Region Göteborg and IT&Telekomföretagen within Almega.