Last week, I spent the day at Manchester Digital’s Skills Conference, which is part of their annual four day Skills Festival (#MDSkillsFest). I went along to see if I could learn some useful things to bring back to Sheffield, to maybe help us get a head start on some strategies around skills and talent.

The day began with a quick run through the results of Manchester Digital’s latest skills survey. The findings were based on responses from about 100 of their members. Here are some of the headlines:

• In the past year, nearly 80% of the respondents recruited at least one person.
• 25% of the people employed were in developer roles, which are also the hardest to fill. The next hardest to fill are sales/marketing and project management roles.
• Developer roles, account management and business development are also the roles that will continue to grow most in importance.

44% of respondents said that they had inflated salaries in order to stay competitive. While developer salaries had increased, the role with the biggest pay rise (40%) was UX. There wasn’t any discussion of this but I wonder if it is because UX roles are being taken more seriously, or whether they tend to require a large amount of experience?

An interesting angle on this salary inflation issue was that not only does it make it harder for smaller companies to compete for talent but it could also make the city unattractive to inward investors. The comment was, “We risk pricing ourselves out of the market”.

80% of respondents have taken on an apprentice and 80% of those said they were happy with the results. Of those who weren’t happy, the main concerns were around the quality of the apprentice and the quality of the training provision. There was some discussion around whether the quality of apprentice issue was perhaps due to unrealistic expectations on the part of the employers or poor matching between apprentice and employer.

None of these statistics are surprising and the big message of the day was that there is a serious skills gap in the digital industries which is going to get worse. But, as one speaker pointed out, this is really nothing new and maybe we just need to get used to the fact that any successful industry has an ongoing skills challenge to contend with.

Either way, what I was really interested in is what we should be doing about it and whether there were any successful ideas that Sheffield could borrow.

Most of the initiatives featured at the conference were fairly small scale. As you would expect, Code Clubs, community groups and spaces, and coding workshops for women were all raised. There were discussions about the need to build a stronger pipeline through education, improve the links between business and education at all levels and promote the region in order to attract talent from elsewhere.

Two ideas that I hadn’t really heard before were that employers should work together to attract and retain talent and that the business community should find ways to make sure that smaller companies were able to compete for talent. Both of these require businesses to put aside their natural competitive stance and act together for the good of the local industry as a whole. That’s something that I believe is possible, but it will take strong leadership from a few respected role models.

There were also several mentions during the day of the need to attract more women into digital careers, as a way to help solve the skills crisis. The skills audit showed that the gender split of employees was 60% male, 40% female but, when that was narrowed down to technical roles, the split was 70% male, 30% female. However, I noticed that the only initiatives that were discussed in relation to women were small-scale and social enterprise focused. There was no discussion around what, if anything, should be done on a larger scale.

Similarly, nearly all of the discussions focused on coding, with a nod in the direction of design. This despite the fact that the survey itself highlighted the importance of sales/marketing/business development and project management capability.

Lastly, I was interested to see what initiatives Manchester Digital has in place. They highlighted the following:

• An employers forum which is tasked with addressing the issues flagged up by the skills audit, undertaking market and salary benchmarking and building links with education.
• Working with the Manchester Growth Company to deliver industry standard careers advice to schools and colleges.
• A mentoring scheme to help staff at all levels develop their skills and progress their careers, in order to improve retention of skilled people. My understanding is that Manchester Digital member companies will be asked to pledge a certain number of hours of mentoring per year.
• More events to engage students throughout the year so that they are motivated to stay in the region after graduation.

I think these are all worthwhile ideas and I’d be interested to know what others think (either via the comments or in the #_skills channel on Slack). Sheffield Digital is already helping to strengthen links between employers and education and we’ve had discussions around providing more useful and appropriate careers advice.

If you’d like to see the full presentation of the Manchester digital skills audit, you can view the slides here. The detail of the survey is due to be published at the end of February.