ComputerWeekly: Cognizant’s Head of Human Resources for Europe Says Education Reform in the UK Should Focus on Knowledge of the Modern World

“The importance of schooling to the long-term success of the UK cannot be stressed strongly enough, and any potential reforms should be made with the current and future needs of real businesses in mind,” writes Fiona Woods. “Increasingly, this means better teaching of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) skills in schools for two main reasons. Firstly, it will help plug the existing skills gap in this country by supplying more engineers and scientists. Secondly, increasingly STEM education will be valued by other industries as every industry is becoming more technology intensive, and not less.”

To progress beyond entry level in almost any industry, she says, is to require a basic understanding of the technology that underpins business process and information management, and the capacity to do so is laid down in the early years. “Similarly, university courses of every stamp should make efforts to show how the skills they teach fit into the new business paradigm, where information technology forms the backbone of any business of reasonable size,” she suggests.

Citing a poll finding that half of regular graduate employers in the UK are not ‘work-ready’, and similar research in the past suggesting a lack of commercial awareness as one of the major contributors to this malaise, Woods writes, “There are certainly many aspects to this problem, but true commercial awareness in the modern economy is impossible without an understanding of the place of technology in the workings of the business, and that understanding will become increasingly important for school leavers as well as graduates and will better serve the needs of the economy as a whole.”

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