You are here > Home > News
Rapid pace of IT change 'creating a skills gap'
IT News |
02/08/2012
Technology is racing ahead faster than ever before, making it difficult for professional expertise to keep up, it has been claimed.
Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business and co-author of 'Race Against The Machine', explained that IT inventions are building upon each other.
He said that when companies and individuals make innovations, they do not use up the stock of innovations the way people may use physical resources.
Mr Brynjolfsson noted that innovations build on each other, leading to a rapid pace of change.
"When you combine innovations, you get a third innovation. This happened centuries ago with electricity and pumps and you got air conditioning, refrigeration, and new technologies," he stated.
"Today, the components of this innovation are digital and it makes it that much easier to combine and re-combine and create new things."
Mr Brynjolfsson said that technology is racing ahead, but our skills, organisations and culture are not able to keep up.
"As a consequence, there is a bigger and bigger gap between what the technologies can and are doing and what our skills and organisations are," he claimed.
This skills gap is leading to a lot of disruptions, and causing job losses and falling wages, Mr Brynjolfsson suggested.
"I think it is going to lead to more and more discourse as we get this growing disconnect between technological capabilities and our own skills and organisations," he added.
In a recent interview with Computer Weekly, John Harris, chair of The Corporate IT Forum, claimed that years of IT outsourcing have taken their toll on skill levels within the sector.
"While outsourcing did bring value, people moved jobs that should not have been moved. We outsourced our skills pipeline," he claimed.
"It is important to feed the pipeline at the bottom end."
Posted by Stephen Wilkinson
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IT Recruitment Agency - 12.5% Fee / 3 Month, 100% Rebate - Transparent Recruitment Fees Since 1999.
Sign up to our e-newsletter service to receive our headline news directly to your inbox
