IT’s quest for talent

IT lessons in British schools were lambasted for being boring by children in January this year, and many teachers agree there’s a distinct lack of flair in the way young people are introduced to technology. If it’s boring at school, the assumption goes, it will be boring at work – which means finding good IT staff is a nightmare for retailers.

Nurturing future IT talent is something the retail sector welcomes, because today there are serious skills gaps in the industry. “A major concern is that people who do have IT qualifications lack wider business knowledge,” says Robin Turner, former Arcadia IT director and now managing director of training company First Friday. He adds: “The challenge for many companies is bridging that gap.”

There have been some attempts to address the issue. Education secretary Michael Gove has launched a consultation on scrapping the existing ICT (information and communication technology) curriculum for schools from September 2012, and a key objective of the review is to “offer a more creative and challenging curriculum”, in the hope of inspiring more young people to consider a career in technology.

It remains to be seen if this will be enough. Retailers often outsource to India for development and programming work. One worry is that experts in legacy back office systems from software suppliers such as IBM, SAP and Oracle are now retiring, with few newly qualified replacements coming through. And while India has cheap skills today, wages are rising so off-shoring won’t always be practical. It might not be long until employing UK developers becomes a better option.

People are graduating with programming skills, but they don’t always have adequate retail experience or specific platform skills to take on challenging multichannel development roles. Meanwhile, analytics experts with the ability to turn multichannel data into gold are hard to find.

It is a difficult challenge for IT project managers to keep up with the pace of change in retail technology. “Retail moves so quickly that it can be hard for the IT industry to keep up,” says Aurora group omnichannel director Ish Patel. “Finding people who can manage new applications can be a challenge. It requires leadership, communication and change management skills, as well as commercial awareness and knowledge of the technology.”

Retailers are also competing with IT suppliers and consultancies for retail systems talent, and are less likely to be able to match their levels of pay. Because demand for good people is so great and there’s so much movement in retail IT roles, pay expectations are high. There’s also an issue of job satisfaction – many look for a varied experience and the chance to develop, which means retailers need to think carefully about their retention and engagement strategies.

Not surprisingly, influential IT leaders believe a talent pool must be built for retail IT in the UK, and fast. John Lewis IT director Paul Coby has warned that the UK faces a skills crisis that will harm global competitiveness unless businesses and the Government join forces and take action.

Planning for the future is made more challenging by the fact that retail is undergoing radical change. ReThink Recruitment specialises in hiring for retail IT roles, and director Iain Blair says the market dynamics for technology jobs in retail have been shaped by customers expecting and demanding multichannel services when shopping.

“Retailers are trying hard to achieve a seamless multichannel service offer, and this has caused a high demand for multichannel solutions architects with genuine subject matter expertise,” says Blair. “That means IT specialists with understanding of the software will enable highly complicated transactions, but they also need to have solid knowledge of how retail works and be familiar with the wider language of retail.”

At the same time, retailers aspire to building a single view of the customer. So, knowing customer behaviour, tracking activity via CRM systems, and carrying out data analytics to shape business decisions are all skills in demand says Blair. And recruiting from other sectors isn’t always an option, he adds. “People with systems experience around offering mortgages or holidays aren’t necessarily going to have the right skills and knowledge for retail,” he says.

So the pressure is on to attract and retain retail IT talent from within. It’s important to ensure the core IT people within the UK really understand the business they’re part of. Comet IT director Kevin O’Brien says it would help if the Government assembled a body of IT experts charged with preparing for the future. “If a dedicated group could take up the challenge of improving business-led IT training in schools and colleges, things could greatly improve in five years’ time,” he says. More talent development here in the UK would certainly aid British retailers, and with youth unemployment levels high, better IT education could have wider economic benefits too.