roundtable: IT skills & funding 49


business. “It was going to be £1m in costs just to get the deal through.“


Hawkins said most of his entrepreneurial friends had sold their businesses to equity or trade sales, rather than go to market for funding. “Acquisitions are rife at the moment as people try to build a portfolio and integrate businesses into a cloud/comms/data service package.“


“Investment in HR and people development through specific training is certainly a focus for us in order to improve necessary staff skills and maintain loyalty.“


In certain markets, there was often a lot of vendor support to maintain staff accreditation and skillsets, he added.


Falconer‘s company has expanded from 30 to 420 staff in 10 years. “Conventionally people hire on skills and experience as a first criteria, then intellectual capability and finally attitude. We tend to reverse that by hiring people with the right attitude, and then we‘ll help them build up their skills. Having said that, there are areas where skills and experience are essential.“


David Bloxham


Havercroft agreed that M&A activity was increasing. “PE houses are trying to group companies together where they are missing an element – I have personally seen this in certain ‘hot‘ areas such as cloud offering, data security etc. That way they can strip out costs, use economies of scale and gain a more powerful entity to move on in three years time. Sometimes motivations can differ between PE houses and the corporate boards which has meant deals haven‘t progressed.“


Funding-wise, for the right deal demand is there from both bank and non-bank funding he added, the average multiples for M&A are getting better, especially in the £2m-plus EBITDA bracket. What has shown to be important in transactions is the amount of ‘skin in the game‘ by the equity participant.


Focus on: skills


What qualities do employers look for?


Murray reported a recent study that claimed the skills gap was getting worse and that most European IT businesses would be suffering a major shortage of skilled workers by 2015, despite current efforts of governments to address the issue.


Walker said skills gaps depended upon the technology area a business was operating in. “We are not seeing a shortage of skills in our space, because we operate in a heavily Microsoft-focused area.


“However, the combination of good technical skills with good relationship building and customer-facing attributes is something every business has to focus on nowadays.


It


is very relevant for individuals to be building their accreditation and skillsets around certain technologies, without ignoring the ‘soft skills‘ required when dealing with customers.


THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – JULY/AUGUST 2013


Gamma also runs apprenticeship schemes to fill its skills gap, the key areas being IP engineering and software development. New immigration rules had not been helpful, said Falconer. “We lost talented people from our Newbury site when their immigration visas were not renewed. The bizarre thing was that some of them went back to the Indian sub-continent, took their work with them, and we outsourced it to the company they joined. How that works for the UK, I don‘t really know.“


Gamma is fortunate to have locations around the UK and in Europe. “For us, it‘s just as easy to get to Budapest as Glasgow, and having the ability to flex people and decant functions between sites has been helpful. Being flexible about hours and homeworking is important too, to help overcome skills raids from other companies.“


Ironically, global technology was also helping to retain staff. “For example we have one engineer in Australia who works for us at night.“


In the UK, high-quality IP engineers were difficult to recruit, “ … and if you do train them up, you can lose them quickly to a higher salary, so it‘s quite a challenge.“


Hawkins agreed. “You give them all these qualifications and they leave. To insure it is a fair investment for us, we now put it in contracts that people leaving within two years pay back the cost of their training. Staff seem pretty happy about that.“


Being based in Bournemouth, away from the main southeast technical hub, actually assisted staff retention, he added. “And if people do want to move, then we are the only infrastructure company in Dorset.“


For Arqiva, it was more about having experience relevant for the job, said McMillan. “Our requirements are diverse. We have different challenges for different parts of the company. General IT skills are not difficult to obtain, but core broadcast engineering is a highly specialist area so we tend to get people out of universities and train them. And with new technologies such as IPTV there just aren‘t that many people around the world who have the skills.“


Bloxham: “I think there are always people available but the markets are very competitive. Businesses are generally looking for people


Bob Falconer


McMillan mentioned secondary education computing classes that teach PowerPoint rather than programming. “That‘s a very big difference in training people for technology careers. We need to find more teachers capable of teaching programming rather than just the use of software.“


She pointed out that the majority of Stanford University USA graduates take computer programming within their education, irrespective of their degree focus.


Continued overleaf ... www.businessmag.co.uk


with the right skills and attitude and it doesn‘t matter what their passport says.“


Accreditation as a 3-Star Best Company to Work For does help attract the best staff he added.


The problems of staff


retention Bloxham raised the issue of extended requirements for foreign migrants to gain Tier One visas. “Changes in immigration policy are definitely making it more difficult to find the right people to hire. Looking back, the majority of people I have placed in IT and engineering technology have not been of UK origin. I can see the political aspects, but it is affecting the ability of UK business to be internationally competitive.


“The second problem is that while we have great universities and education, the UK academic drive over the past 20-30 years has been away from maths, engineering and scientific subjects and hence we are not producing enough graduates with those skills“.


He highlighted efforts to address that issue – the national Teen Tech initiative, and locally UTC Reading, partnered by Cisco and Microsoft, set to open in September for students aged 14- 19. “There is an awakening and understanding of the need for change in order to keep the UK technology industry playing.“


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56