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IT Skills Shortage - Amicus Policy:
Union calls for bridge-gap, not stop-gap, skills crisis measures
The Amicus Information Technology Professionals Association representing the union’s 12,000 IT professionals has condemned calls for stop-gap measures in response the skills crisis which fail to tap talent available in the UK. Instead we call for a concerted and comprehensive 6-point plan of action involving:
- tapping the available talent - and
would-be talent - of the current and potential
workforce by investing in people and developing IT as
a career of choice in the quest to make Britain the
knowledge capital of Europe
- opening doors to people only too
often excluded or ignored within IT by ending
discrimination against women, disabled people and
those who are regarded as too old or too young and
establishing a directory of role models
- replacing the current employer
rhetoric about flexibility used as a code to mean the
right to hire and fire with impunity with a 2-way
flexibility serving the needs of employers and
employees through family-friendly and
employment-friendly policies such as better
maternity, paternity and parental leave, childcare
and eldercare, career breaks, job sharing,
teleworking and homeworking and publicising good
practice
- developing an industry wide scheme
for skilling and reskilling of labour, funded by
employers in the sector, to overcome the bad
undercutting the good syndrome whereby employers who
wish to skill and reskill their workforces are
fearful of their staff being poached by employers who
do not
- establishing a 'talent bank'
multi-employer electronic clearing house to match
skills no longer needed by one employer with skill
needs required elsewhere
- expanding the pool of supply from
non-traditional areas and embracing unemployed people
currently ignored