Report Highlights Need for Transferable Skills in Tech: Reinforcing Martingale’s Approach to Development Programmes
Findings from a recent report by The Hg Foundation and the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) support the need for transferable skills development, in addition to core technical skills to enable students to get a foothold in the competitive tech sector.
Martingale Foundation has championed the importance of transferable skills and wider development for success beyond students’ degrees into research and these findings align closely with our approach.
The report ‘A narrowing pipeline? What changes in UK tech hiring might tell us about future opportunities in the sector’ suggests that the tech sector is undergoing significant change in the workforce, with a sharp decline in the demand for software developers and the volume of tech roles advertised compared to non-tech occupations.
The report emphasises that “the nature of tech jobs and the skills required are changing fast” and this has a particular impact on entry-level roles with a greater proportion of job adverts looking for mid-level and senior roles, and a rise in qualification requirements.
The report suggests that to overcome challenges in the sector, early career professionals “are likely to require a combination of specialist skills in growth areas – for example data science – and broader commercial, project management and transferable skills.” While this report focuses on the need to develop transferable skills to support career success in tech fields, the same applies to support for accessing academic and research careers. As industry and academia become increasingly collaborative, the skills required for academics to excel have changed with a greater emphasis on transferable and professional skills such as project management, communication and leadership.
Since its inception, Martingale has centred the development of broader professional skills as a core aspect of supporting Scholars to succeed in their future research careers. Through the Masters Development Programme and PhD Leadership Programme, Martingale presents Scholars with a unique offering that complements and runs alongside their degrees. The programmes combine key skills development such as project planning and communications training, engagement opportunities and access to a network of leading figures across academia and industry to support Scholars to become the best researchers they can.
The stand-out event of the programme is Solve for X, in which Scholars work together to solve real-world problems. Solve for X provides a space for Scholars to develop the broader transferable skills highlighted in the report and places Scholars in an excellent position to evidence their ability to work in a fast-paced, interdisciplinary setting as they pursue the next steps in their career.
Sophie Bird, Programme Officer at the Martingale Foundation, who has worked directly with Scholars since August 2023, shared “It has been fantastic to see the Scholars grow through the course of their degrees and the development programmes, and to see the culmination of this at the first Solve for X Training Camp in summer 2024. The Scholars have all these amazing transferable skills as well as their academic knowledge and technical skills, and I’m sure they will all go far in their careers.”
Martingale is playing a key role in supporting talented students facing financial barriers to become successful researchers, helping them to be competitive in an ever-changing workforce landscape.
Find out more about the Martingale Development Programme here.