There are complaints from industry that new recruits from the research sector lack the software engineering and professional skills that are required to develop software in industry. We are working with our colleagues at DiRAC and a group of industry collaborators to understand this issue, to detail skills that are lacking in new recruits and to develop materials to help fill these gaps. This will not only raise skill levels across the sector but also make it easier to develop a career through industry and research.
The UK workforce’s digital skill gaps remain stubbornly present. Business, industry bodies, government and academia all document how a lack of skills appropriate for today’s job market is limiting industry’s ability to fill vacancies and meet demand for services, threatening the UK’s place as a leading technological power.
There is a lack of essential digital skills amongst the general workforce that limits their ability to communicate, handle information, transact online, and problem solve. Government and industry are working together to tackle this, with endeavours to provide basic digital literacy classes to the public. For those with more confidence, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) funds 16-week, no-skills-required bootcamps to introduce people to the sector.
Amongst those trained in software engineering and computer science, evidence indicates a lack of technical and professional skills required in industry. University courses find it difficult to keep up with the skills needs of the technology sector, where the breadth of requirements is rivalled only by the pace of change. Large commercial organisations can attempt to address this issue with their own in-house training. Smaller firms, which need graduates who can hit the ground running, struggle to offer this support.
While technical skills are clearly important, there is also a strong emphasis in the literature on missing professional or “soft” skills. One suggestion is for higher education to recalibrate their teaching to better reflect how industry works, and to introduce techniques such as problem-based learning to instil some of the professional skills that industry seeks.
Crucially, the existing training efforts overlook one key group: PhD or postdoctoral fellows who transition from academia to industry. While these workers are some of the most skilled and in-demand candidates, their software engineering skills were developed in a research environment which can be very different to an industry environment. One of the obvious differences is that it is difficult to gain the experience of working in large development teams in a research environment, whereas this is commonplace in industry. Smoothing the transition between research and industry will bring benefits to both sectors.
Our study will identify the skills that industry perceives as lacking in their recruitment from the academic research sector. We will conduct a series of interviews with leading industries of all sizes and identify common areas where skills are lacking or need to be improved. We will then work with our industry collaborators and DiRAC to develop training that will start the process of filling these gaps. We will share these training materials under an open licence so that our training community can work with us to increase skill levels across the research sector.
