Report on recent ICT Skills Workshop


Posted by superuser on Wednesday 7th of December 2011 | 0 Comment(s)

The event was held on 18th November at Tech Centre Manchester from 1 to 5pm. The event page can be accessed through here.

Background

This workshop was brought to you by Techcelerate on behalf of ICT Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) and in association with Silicon Valley Comes to UK (SVC2UK) organised by Sherry Coutu. The Workshop will discuss the following two issues, bringing on board participants from academia and business.

Two topics were targeted:

1. The number of British students undertaking software engineering degrees have continually declined over the last few years. Is this a myth or reality in the north west? What can be done to reverse this trend?

2. At the same time, those who qualify continues to be attracted to large corporations dominated by the financial sector. What can be done to help young and small companies attract top talent?

Event Report

bozward's picture DavidRydeheard's picture AngelSalazar's picture joelg's picture

Software Engineering Education and Entrepreneurship Landscape Information Technology Management and Software Engineering

David Bozward, Director NACUE and Entrepreneur spoke about early years of computing, and the problems of teaching how to use computers instead of how to programme at schools, why US companies have become household names whilst UK companies are only known by those in the industry, issues around the industry generating lower employment than traditional industries, the ever increasing number of software engineering courses leading to confusion, should students join the best universities that guarantee 100% employment, and why it is important to consider joining startups.

David Rydeheard from University of Manchester spoke about their 100% employment record and the increasing links to industry and bringing on board entrepreneurs such as Alasdair Rawsthorne who founded Transitive whilst at the University and then selling to IBM, and returning back to academia.

Angel Salazar from Manchester Metropolitan University spoke about software engineering becoming a commodity where programming is undertaken in Asia and other growing economies at low cost whilst management of resources and tasks are undertaken by UK graduates. Angel is currently in the process of setting up his first tech startup exploiting IP created by university research

Joel Gascoigne, CEO of BufferApp spoke via Skype from San Francisco about his experience of setting up tech companies, and his recent journey with Bufferapp and the decision he took to move the company to San Francisco from Birmingham.

A break out session was held splitting into two groups:

During the session, we learned that most of the current students or recent graduates who attended, have started programming at a very young age and have build applications. One application that caught much of the discussion was hottie in the library, a website a student setup to display photographs of good looking female students without any details, which has attracted more than 17,000 visitors in 4 days. As the 5th day, which was also the last day of the summer term, the website was shutdown.

All students agreed that computer engineering courses should include an entrepreneurship module. However, this will have a significant impact on employment statistics if graduates decide to setup startups than become an employee. We did not have time to discuss this issue further. Students also felt that there should be more access to local events where they can learn about setting up businesses.