In our first guest blog, Polly Purvis, chief executive of ScotlandIS, gives us her insight into the impact of Brexit on the tech sector, with part one focusing on the European talent pool, and how leaving the EU may impact our ability to find the right people to continue growing the Scottish tech sector.
Brexit creates a number of challenges for Scotland’s fast-growing tech industry. Chief amongst these is access to talent. Other areas of concern are regulatory divergence, access to research funding and growth capital, and issues around market access both for goods and services.
Despite these potential challenges, there is also an opportunity to counter the effects of uncertainty and stimulate the economy by making Scotland a more competitive and productive place to do business. Digital technologies can help all sectors of the economy to increase productivity through, for example, business and process transformation, ecommerce and the increased use of data analytics to inform decision making. This represents an exceptional commercial opportunity for the digital technologies industry that could counterbalance some of the issues associated with Brexit.
Looking at these in more detail, with the exceptional growth in the tech sector over the last ten years, and the associated move to digital solutions across many other parts of the economy the demand for talent is higher than ever. Despite several initiatives to address the skills shortage which the industry already faces, the capacity to add significantly greater numbers of home grown skilled people to the workforce in the short term is limited.
Free movement of labour has been a definite advantage and tech businesses across the country have benefited from access to the wider European talent pool. Many companies have successfully recruited highly skilled people from across Europe and see them as a key part of their workforce. Some EU nationals have established tech businesses here, and EU students studying at Scottish universities are an important source of talent for our industry.
In 2015 (the latest year we have data for) non-UK EU nationals made up 11% of the software and digital technologies workforce. These people bring essential skills and they also provide a cosmopolitan outlook that is highly valued in an industry with global markets. They help tech businesses build that blend of culture, entrepreneurship and technology excellence to compete internationally.
This is echoed in our universities where the ability to attract world leading researchers has strengthened Scotland’s reputation for academic excellence in the fields of computing and informatics, gathering specialists in data science, AI, cybersecurity, speech recognition, machine learning and blockchain, which underpin the government’s ambitions to build a thriving digital economy.
The UK Government recently highlighted in their Digital Charter that they aspire to provide the “best place to start and grow a digital business” with the UK leading the world in “innovation-friendly regulation that encourages the tech sector and provides stability for businesses”.
It is therefore essential that we create a favourable visa regime that will enable firms and academia to recruit and retain people as easily and seamlessly as possible. We must also ensure that Europeans currently working in our industry continue to feel valued and welcome. The UK Government’s announcement last week of a new visa route aimed at attracting more overseas entrepreneurs to come to the UK to create start-ups, jobs and economic growth is a useful addition to the current suite of visas, but more needs to be done.
In part two of her blog, Polly will look at what opportunities Brexit brings to refocus efforts around ensuring we have enough homegrown digital professionals in the years to come.