IT skills gap 'will not be plugged by schools'

14:34 17th June 2008

Secondary school education is not doing enough to help fill the next generation of IT careers, experts have argued.

A skills gap in the industry means that those who have completed IT training are in huge demand - and that situation could continue if changes are not made at classroom level, says Professor Lachlan MacKinnon, head of the school of computing and creative technologies at the University of Abertay.

His concerns were echoed by Karen Price, chief executive of e-Skills UK, who told Silicon that current school IT curriculums - which tend not to focus on deep technical skills - are having "an extremely negative impact" on school-leavers' attitudes towards IT careers.

The comments follow the opinion of Wendy Hall, president of the US Association of Computing Machinery, who told VNUnet that the IT skills gap shouls be tackled at all levels - from school to the workplace.

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