The Digital Skills Audit 2015, conducted by Manchester Digital, revealed that 57 per cent of companies in the digital sector have had to refuse business. With 29 per cent of these claiming the work was worth more than £50,000 and 28 per cent saying the work was worth between £25,000 and £50,000.
The audit of 100 digital business in the North also revealed that developers were the most difficlt roles to fill which reflected the results of the last audit in 2014. However, this has dropped from 61 per cent in 2014 to 50% in 2015. Sales and business development positions were cited the next hardest role to fill (38 per cent) followed by designers (30 per cent).
Over half of the digital businesses surveyed (51.1 per cent) also said that in order to remain competitive in the labour market they needed to inflate salaries, but the majority of respondents only needed to increase salaries by less than 10 per cent for the job functions.
The results of the 2015 digital skills audit were revealed at The Digital Skills Festival, which is taking place this week in Manchester (10-13 February 2015) to help combat the digital skills shortage in the region.
The results were revealed during the festival’s Digital Skills Summit, where education providers and businesses got together to highlight, address and discuss the issues currently facing the digital sector. It covered a wide range of topics including futureproofing skills for the digital sector and industry support schemes available to tackle the shortage, as well as at what devolution could mean for the industry.
Katie Gallagher, managing director at Manchester Digital, said: “The results of our digital skills audit highlight that we need some short term solutions to the skills shortage and a way of accelerating access to talent. It shows that there is still a need for industry and education to work much more closely together and for SMEs to have much more support in building and developing those relationships.
“The discussions which took place at the conference, following the announcement of the audit results, covered the need for businesses to be far more assertive in their discussions with government to ensure that digital skills are included in the curriculum and that working with industry is not seen as a nice to do.
“In addition, delegates and speakers agreed that there is still a lot of work to do to promote and encourage women to consider careers in digital and technology. This needs to begin at school age and businesses should make sure that their environments are comfortable for women. However there was a general feeling amongst the panel that integration is the way forwards rather than creating female only networking environments.
“This year's conference and the feedback from the panels and audience will continue to shape the work that Manchester Digital do over the coming year. We are already tackling many of the issues raised and it is important that the public sector work with us and use our expertise to solve them. It is reassuring to hear from our members that we are getting it right in terms of the services that we provide but we need to do more and in order to do that we need to secure additional resource, we hope that under the forthcoming devolution deal this will be a possibility.”
To find out more information please visit: www.manchesterdigital.com/events/digital-skills-festival
