Federico Charosky, MD, Quorum Cyber

I have an opinion that might not actually be that popular. I don’t think that there’s that much of a skills gap. I think what we have is an expectation gap.

There’s a gap between what we are willing to pay for the skills and how much we value the skills we are trying to bring into an organisation.

Usually, I don’t find that it’s impossible to find the right people out there if you are able to acknowledge that you won’t find someone with 15 years experience and all the right qualifications for £35,000. I think that’s where there is a massive reality gap.

I’m not saying that there is not a skills gap as well, but I think the biggest problem for an organisation not finding the people they need is not necessarily that the skills aren’t there. It’s what they are willing to pay for the skills, and what companies are willing to pay is often not representative of the market.

Eleanor McHugh, software architect & freelance reality consultant

I think there’s a huge gap between what skills somebody picks up to become a developer and put together an app and run it on a platform, and then getting those developers to be able to work with cryptographic code and to have the sensibility not to reveal too much information.

It’s very difficult to get most client companies to understand that these extra skills or experience has a cost, and that cost has to be factored in.

I would really love to see there be some way in which people could spend two to four years learning their craft as an app developer, and then have an actual clear career path where they can go on to learn specialist skills. That’s a component that seems to be missing in the industry, and our perceptions of value are completely skewed.

Harry McLaren, co-founder, Cyber Scotland Connect

I think I would agree that there is a skills gap. I do a lot of interviewing, both technical screening and final interviews mostly for engineers, especially security engineers. One of the skills I see significantly lacking is what I call foundational skills or soft skills.

I don’t like the term soft skills because it seems to suggest that it is just a nice added extra when it is actually absolutely paramount to a successful candidate. It’s paramount for someone who would be successful within our company and within the industry. I think we all need to move away from the idea that people can just work in a basement on their own not talking to other people.

We live in a collaborative world and we need collaborative teams. We need people with things like emergent leadership who are willing to rise up and help companies but don’t want to build an empire and only be a leader.

We all need to move away from just building empires and trying to be thought leaders and actually help to deliver solutions to problems. With a lot of candidates, I see that they have knowledge of a lot of concepts, but have they done anything with them? Have they had experience with them? Have they experimented? The answer is often “no”, and that’s a shame because we get so many great candidates that we can’t really use in the real world because they lack those skills.

Elaine McKechnie, senior project manager, Clydesdale Bank & vice chair, SWiT

From an organisation perspective, I think it’s really important to understand where you are in the recruitment pipeline. As one of the smaller financial services organisations in the UK, it’s often a challenge to attract and retain top talent. I think if you can recognise that then you can understand what your strategy needs to be to fulfil that.

So if you have a higher rate of attrition you have to have a pipeline to fill that, and I think that means you need to be working with universities and other types of programs such as returners programmes – looking at the skills you need and thinking about how you can bring them in.

It’s not about hiring that person that matches your job spec 100%. It’s about bringing somebody in who you can train up, and try to fill your skills gaps in other ways.

Harry McLaren, co-founder, Cyber Scotland Connect

If I could add one thing in regards to attrition, which we see a lot of. I think it’s important to ensure that you’re giving people interesting work. There’s a lot of very low-value work that we put on a pedestal in our industry and we often don’t seem willing to go beyond it.

I think that’s really critical in trying to keep great, talented people. Companies make the mistake of spending money on them and investing in them, then, often put them into a kind of tier one security help desk function. High-value work leads to a much greater level of commitment.