Are People Our Most Valuable Commodity? - Part 1

One of the advantages of having a party conference in close vicinity to your offices is that it can give you access to the holders of political power. As you may have noted the current Government’s party held their annual conference in Manchester and as such I was invited (along with other local business leaders) to meet with a government minister. 

During our discussions there were two key themes which came out.  The first being 'getting access to government spending' (and getting subsequent payment) via a complex series of supply chains and secondly having the 'available skills' to be able to drive growth. The former topic I will leave for another day.

The general consensus from representatives across a wide range of industries (including transport and construction) was that there was a shortage of skilled resource and that there was a mismatch between the output of the education system and the needs of industry. 

I must admit this surprised me. I can appreciate that there could be a shortage of skills in our industry; where we need a set of specialist capabilities which combine the engineering and IT disciplines, but did not appreciate there may be a shortage in other areas.

At a macro level, I would challenge whether this skills shortage is going to be a barrier to the expected economic recovery. Certainly in our industry we are seeing projects which are being delayed due to lack of trained resource to deliver -  this is in contrast to the common view that cash is the constraining factor.

Written by Phil Gillard
General Manager, SolutionsPT

What can be done about this? I will leave comment on the macro situation to others, however in our industry I believe that we must work towards greater automation. 

By this I mean automating the work being done by the people responsible for delivering and ensuring the availability of Industrial IT systems. 

If we can succeed in automating some of the more mundane tasks, I believe we can not only create extra capacity -  but also help retain people in our industry by making life more interesting. 

In part 2 - next week,  I will explain how I think this could be done.