The UK Home Office has trebled the amount of IT and digital skills training courses for its staff over the last three years as it emerged last month that the UK is losing £63 billion a year due to a digital skills talent gap.
Think tank, Parliament Street discovered this through the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act, which found that digital courses offered to Home Office staff has been increasing since 2016.
In 2016-17, 11 courses were offered to staff with 971 employees taking part. This has now increased to 26 different courses with a total of 3,214 staff taking part, an increase of 230 per cent over the period.
The most popular course in 2016-18 was the ‘Excel foundation’ course, however, in 2018-19 the most popular course has become the ‘Windows 10 and Office 2016 e-Book’.
Sheila Flavell, chief operating officer (COO) at FDM Group, a company that trains graduates, returners to work and ex-military personnel to work as consultants for one of the companies clients said:
It’s encouraging to see a major government department investing heavily in upskilling workers with the latest digital skills and IT expertise.
Technology has a crucial role to play in delivering faster, more efficient public services, whether that’s fighting crime or managing personal details of citizens. Forward-thinking organisations will work hard to attract IT talent but also ensure a diverse pool of training resources are available, so that employees can develop and reinvent themselves for the digital era.
The UK’s digital talent gap is causing the country to lose out on £63 billion a year as companies are finding it increasingly difficult to find the right candidates with the digital skills to fill its vacancies.
This is according to a report conducted by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and the Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) named the Delivering Skills for the New Economy which highlights the costly problem within the UK.
Darius is the editor of HRreview. He has previously worked as a finance reporter for the Daily Express. He studied his journalism masters at Press Association Training and graduated from the University of York with a degree in History.
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