Decline in Number of Science & Technology Graduates is Bad News for the Media Industry

Jamie Gavin, MD Of  inPress Online has produced this guest article for the blog:

There is an interesting skills gap developing in the UK jobs market right now. We are hearing a lot about a lack of competent science and technology graduates and as a recent study by Zurich has highlighted, many tech SMEs are concerned about a lack of IT and tech skills in the current marketplace.

In the media sector however we seem to be faced with an altogether different set of problems: Primarily the decline of traditional media outlets and a lack of jobs for both media graduates and experienced media professionals alike.

A quick look at the data publically available on the totaljobs.com website provides some quantitative evidence of this trend. Of the 140,000 jobs listed on the TotalJobs home page (some of which are listed in multiple categories and by multiple agencies) IT and Internet roles accounted for almost 12,000 of the total number of jobs listed, which is a significant 8.5 per cent.

This category ranked third overall out of the 32 jobs sectors listed on the site, behind only sales (12.2 per cent) and another technology-driven category, ‘Engineering, Manufacturing, & Utilities’ with 10.9 per cent of totaljobs. The category also derived 25.8 per cent of all positions from the £50,000+ per annum salary bracket, placing more than one quarter of total available jobs in the sector in the higher earners category.

The media sector however tells a very different story, with ‘Marketing, Advertising and PR’ jobs accounting for just 4 per cent of the total listed and ‘Media, New Media, and Creative’ jobs accounting for a significantly lower 2.1 per cent. Between them therefore these two arts-degree based categories add up to only 6.1 per cent of total jobs, or a total of 8,538.

In many ways this discrepancy is unsurprising. Media and to a lesser extent PR and marketing roles have traditionally been thought of as more appealing than their more geeky, science and technology based relatives, and that trend would appear to be continuing today.

Where the problem lies however, is in the changing nature of the media and communications industries themselves.

As an online PR agency, inPress Online understands the need for PR and communications professional – as well as journalists themselves – to become more technologically minded. Now of course, there is a distinction to be made between having a working knowledge of social media and working as an ICT manager for a cloud computing company, but there is undoubtedly a wider shift going on within the media from art towards science.

Take for example the role of a journalist. In days gone by their role would have been solely to submit a written article on a relevant subject, from where it would be edited and submitted to the printers for inclusion in the finished publication. Now however, a journalists role has expanded to become extremely IT savvy, incorporating social media publications, SEO, link sharing, multimedia file gathering, etc. So as a general rule of thumb the creative industries themselves are becoming more technically demanding.

As these figures show, and as the current trends indicate, there is a significant lack of graduates and undergraduates who are interested in the more scientific and technology elements of today’s economy, and that could well produce a skills gap for the media and communications industries themselves going forward.