Computing skills debate should be more nuanced, claims Tata executive

UK policy makers should be more selective about who we want to emulate when it comes to improving the nation's levels of computer expertise.

This was the argument put forward by Tata Consultancy Services' director of corporate strategy, Yogesh Chauhan, at a conference on computing and education in central London yesterday.

Earlier, Elizabeth Truss, under secretary of state for Education and Childcare and one of Chauhan's co-panellists, had told delegates: "Put simply, if we want to succeed as a country we need to make sure we are competing with the Chinas and Indias of this world, who are churning out engineers and technologists by the bucket load."

She added that in her opinion, although there is also much the UK can learn from North America and Germany, China is "developing the next generation of very highly skilled people ... and they are moving up the value chain."

However, Chauhan said the question of to whom the UK compares itself to the country's aspirations in a global context needs to be approached in a more nuanced and granular fashion.

"It's not simply about creating a generation of young people who are computer savvy and all the rest of it [and] we will never compete with the Chinas and Indias of this world [because] We don't have, as a country, that scale," he argued.

"So I think ... there has to be some kind of sense of aspiration around where we want the UK to be in terms of the skills we want our young people to have in this industry. Because [it] is vast and there [are] many different types of jobs and sectors and specialisms we can have," he added.

Chauhan said one route the UK should consider "focusing on the creative higher end and trying to generate a cohort of young people who are experts" and the country could position itself in that way on the international market.

"But I think we just need to be getting a bit more sophisticated around this debate," he concluded.