This week the Guardian reports that digital business is at risk in the UK - it needs an extra 745,000 digitally skilled workers within the next three years - otherwise the UK could fall behind.
I've just written about the digital skills gap, and reasons why digital is not dead so this is very timely and provides more fuel to the fire of digital education!
In the article a key arguments is that Universities aren't training students in the right things, resulting in students - after forking out £££ for their education (e.g. in tech or marketing) - being unemployable, with out-dated skills, and in need of retraining:
Students aren't being taught what's done in the market, so we have to retrain people when we take them from university. In our experience, lecturers aren't up to date with the latest tools. In my world practices are changing every six months and so they lose their cutting edge (Dan Kirby, TechDept).
I think the article has a point. But we don't just need to educate young people, but also teach digital business skills especially to SMEs. These guys could do with learning digital marketing techniques such as Analytics and SEO, to understand their website and make it work hard for their business objectives (whatever these might be!).
And who, according to the Guardian article, needs 'oven-ready' digitally skilled employees? Media, marketing and creative industries, alongside the more traditional IT and programming sector.
Great to hear! That means our new MSc in Digital Marketing is well placed to help train the future digital workforce 🙂