New Model Workers, launched yesterday at a seminar in London as part of a collaboration between Nesta, Creative Skillset and The Royal Statistical Society, interviewed 45 data-intensive businesses and found that four in five of them are struggling to find the skills they need.
It reports that data scientists – creative workers with a mix of coding skills, statistical know-how and commercial nous – are particularly hard to come by.
Juan Mateos-Garcia, economics research fellow at Nesta and co-author of the report, referred to people with all these skills as “unicorns” because they are so hard to find. “Everyone is looking for data scientist skills and it’s heating up the market,” he said.
According to the report, there are several reasons for the skills shortage in this area. These include talent being in short supply, often due to a mismatch between education and industry; candidates without enough experience or the wrong mix of skills; and a lack of capability in recruiting data talent. It suggests HR managers and recruiters are unable to understand the data skills their business requires.
“In the short term, companies are experiencing a data talent crunch and are exploring off-shoring outside the UK [to find these skills],” said Mateos-Garcia.
Hasan Bakhshi, report co-author and director of creative economy at Nesta, added that this “data skills crunch” is holding back business growth.
“Urgent action is needed to deal with this and ensure that talent coming out of UK universities is able to transform data into impacts in industry,” he said. “In the longer term, it is critical to communicate to young people that some of the most exciting jobs in the UK today are based on working with data.”
The report makes several recommendations for policymakers, educators and businesses to address these shortages. For businesses, these include upskilling the existing workforce through targeted training and continuous professional development and working to improve the perception of the data analyst profession.
Hetan Shah, executive director of the Royal Statistical Society, said: “We are now living in a data economy. The UK needs to skill up fast when it comes to data, statistics and analysis, or we will miss the boat.”
