2017 prediction 10 – ITC skills shortages worsen in 2017

Figure 10 – ITC supplier employment forecast

Source: ITCandor, 2017

Maintaining salary levels, retaining or even increasing local employment through limiting immigration is an important issue in the decisions of the UK to leave the EU and the election of Donald Trump as US president; however our industry already suffers from significant skills shortages in areas such as cyber and physical security, application development, hardware maintenance, analytics and networking, which will be exacerbated by new restrictions – especially in the EU where the suppliers and users can offer employment to anyone living in the region. In the UK it is possible that quotas and permits for (many newly ‘foreign’) workers will ease the growing challenge, but any such moves will be targeted at more important industry sectors such as the National Health Service and education. My Figure shows a forecast for employment levels in among ITC suppliers, which has grown to around 20m in 2016 and I forecast will be nearer 20m in 2020.

My tenth and last prediction is that growing nationalism and protectionism will have a measurable and significant negative impact, making our skills shortages even worse.

Eventually many will realise that the automation and digitisation driven so actively by our industry is a much greater threat to full employment than immigration. The ‘Catch 22’ of Brexit is that factories will only move back to Western countries when automation makes the processes equivalent or cheaper in price than they are today in India, China and other countries with much lower wage costs; ‘labour price arbitrage’ will be replaced by ‘automation arbitrage’, resulting in much smaller workforces. My advice to all of you is to become specialised in controlling machines or processes, since these are the only roles likely to be retained as manual and administrative work is replaced by machines, AI, robots and/or computers.

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