Education and the skills divide

Skills shortage – it’s a point that’s being mentioned a lot more, it’s also something that everyone across a very broad spectrum from hiring managers, to businesses would attest to happening a lot more these day. The result thereof is a proliferation of counter offers, salaries being offered sky-rocketing in order to entice or retain staff. That’s an entire topic for another day though, the part that I’d like to address is the first word of the paragraph.

There’s probably a not great deal that can be done in the immediate short term to address the skills shortage: the number of say, experienced developers isn’t going to miraculously increase, genetic science isn’t going leap forward exponentially and let us clone the best of them any time soon(it’s something I’d happily invest in though).
So the lofty, more long term solution and more sustainable way I see this being solved is the much maligned word: education…

​What about education? Generally speaking the most gifted candidates I’ve encountered from juniors right through to highly accomplished architect level candidates are continually learning. It’s more often than not, the differentiator that separates a really good candidate from an exceptional one. Many years after some have finished their degrees they’re still enrolling, still learning. Yes, on the job experience is still going to be first prize for continuing to push the envelope but even the most highly skilled are still students, still learning. Some are going back and enrolling in classes and some are using resources that don’t have a building with classrooms which I believe are going to help revolutionise where a lot of the current and next generations of skilled labour are going to come from, on-line courses.

They’re nothing new – we’ve had them for more than 2 decades. What has changed since then is their availability, the way they’re presented, the variety of content that’s available etc. You don’t need to travel to one of the most lauded university’s on the planet to be taught 1st year Java by one of the world’s best professors at MIT. They’ve made each and every course he presented available for the world to watch and learn from. There are countless other examples (particularly in the development field) such as CodeAcademy which present numerous courses on everything from front end coding to server side languages. They’re revolutionising the way people look at education and, indeed, the accessibility to course material.

So where does this leave us now? Education has always existed, careers have always existed and in tandem with that will continue to morph and change with technology and social systems. What I believe this little on-line education revolution creates is opportunity. Opportunity for those with access to the internet, the possibility to forge a path into a role they might not have had access to many years ago. Opportunity for those who’d like to further expand their their skills set. Opportunity to bridge the gap as far as a big skills shortage is concerned and, finally, opportunity to help ourselves.