MicroScope+ Premium Content/MicroScope

In my role, I encounter two distinct situations that highlight the skills challenge faced in the UK channel sector. The first is, perhaps unsurprisingly, when I look at what’s coming in the business’s project pipeline. Currently the market offers a wealth of opportunities and I’m certain that I’m not alone in feeling the pressure to build up the teams we need to meet that demand at pace. It’s about technical skills, of course – especially in terms of emerging, transformative technologies for which genuine expertise is still incredibly scarce – but it’s also about finance, sales, operations, management, and everything else that needs to come together for achieving successful and valuable execution. The second scenario is when I go out to local schools as a STEM ambassador. There, I’m faced with a very different set of questions: it’s about what children need to envision themselves in a technology career. It involves breaking down stereotypes, especially regarding gender, and a lot of broadening students’ sense of what a ...