The UK IT channel contributes around £50 billion to the UK economy yet growth is restricted by the need to recruit enough staff. The new Community Interest Company (CIC) will look to bridge the skills gap by raising awareness of career opportunities across the IT channel to those in education, those returning to employment, and those looking to change career. This includes, but is not limited to, career opportunities for girls, BAME, disabled, neurodiverse and disadvantaged groups.
TCA’s leadership committee includes Kilpatrick, Hayley Mooney, managing director of Crayon, Hayley Roberts, CEO of Distology, Alex Tatham, executive director of Westcoast, Lisa Roberts, director of channels and alliances at Rubrik, Rebecca Monk, chief people officer at Softcat, and Wendy Shore from the TCA.
The idea for TCA was born from Kilpatrick’s frustrations with talent recruitment and retention. With 40 years’ channel experience and involvement with the STEM Generation Charity, he felt it was time to create tangible action to address the sector’s strategic failings around recruitment requirements.
Kilpatrick (pictured) commented, “We need more people in the IT industry, particularly women, and feedback is saying to get youngsters interested in the industry as early as possible - from primary school level.
“We have had a shortage of talent for decades, and there is a continual stress point with companies paying money to hire and retrain talent, followed by churn and then repeating the cycle again. This impacts remuneration at all points in the business chain, which then negatively impacts growth and profits.
“Everyone is struggling to get more staff. What we need is a channel-wide strategy that goes down to schools and up to government and NGO levels. We have to make the message heard that our industry is an area where you can do great things.”
The UK channel needs to recruit around 100,000 people to plug the current skills gap, with businesses spending around £1.5 billion a year just to hold onto key staff and avoid losing them to the competition. TCA will work to dispel some of the myths associated with careers in tech including you don’t need to be a coder to get at job, less than 5 per cent of roles involve coding, and most roles do not require science and maths skills.
The Tech Channel Ambassadors (TCA) team is calling on vendors, distributors, VARs, system integrators and service providers to join and make it a component of their ESG efforts.