‘E-commerce training vital for Scots
By Colin Donald Business Editor
LAC K of ma r k e t demand means that Scotl a nd’s hi g her education bodies should hold back from o f f e r i ng f ul l - t i me specialist t raining in e- commerce, a new report from Strathclyde Business School ( SBC) has claimed.
The unpublished report, seen by the Sunday Herald, recommends that instead of introducing a full MSccourse to address Scotland’s perceived skills deficiency in the UK’s fastest-growing business sector, industry needs can be met by short “continuing professional development modules” (CPD) which could “over time” contribute towards academic qualifications.
The findings were a response to a Scottish Enterprise- commissioned report published in May 2012, which concluded that, while Scots- based firms contributed to the UK’s global e- commerce leadership, Scotland remained “way behind other parts of the UK” in its lack of a critical mass of personnel skilled in this specialised and technically demanding area.
Hailed as a “landmark report”, the earlier paper, by consultants SQW, proposed the creation of a pioneering academic initiative in Scotland “analogous to the role that Abertay University has played in strengthening the supply of skills into Scotland’s video-games industry”.
The report suggested: “There may be a case for one of Scotland’s central belt universities offering a one-year MSc course specialising in e-commerce, offered to students with a variety of first degrees and developed and delivered in liaison with industry, in order to help strengthen the supply of skills into the e-commerce market – both for traders and suppliers.”
The new SBS report which rejects the proposal has already drawn fire from Scotland’s leading proponent of e-commerce education and training, Dr Peter Mowforth, the founding director of Glasgow University’s Turing Institute of artificial intelligence, who now heads Glasgow-based e-commerce supplier, Indez.
Mowforth said: “Multi- million turnover companies that are trading, growing, profiting and exporting from Scotland are not in short supply. To the best of my knowledge, almost all of them are suffering from skills shortage. however, after five or six years of raising the issue, Scotland still has no course, no training, no strategy or plan from the public sector to meet their [firms’] needs.
“E- commerce in the report is defined as ‘the selling or trading of goods or services online and related digital marketing activities to drive traffic to the online presence’. This is gobbledegook and certainly not part of any definition I’m aware of. If you get the definition wrong, then everything that follows will be incorrect.
“E-commerce is a paradigm shift for business and the only way through this is through better skills and training. SME owners need to get their heads around it, then re-skill people in the technical things they need to do. This report makes more mention of social media and ‘digital leadership’ than it does of e-commerce.
“As I understand it, it took over six months [to compile the report], but there is no indication of who was consulted and what they were asked. If I had paid for this, I would question whether it was fit for purpose.”
According to figures released by the Office for National Statistics in November 2012, total business- to-