This year’s presenter of The Warren Centre’s 2007 Innovation Lecture, Dr Chris Nicol, has called on media, government and industry to address the nation’s crisis in ICT talent.

“While the economy is strong due to the resources boom, if we don’t start to address the ICT skills shortage now, in a few years time the pipeline for ICT will be dry,” Dr Nicol warns. “The so-called ‘tech wreck’ of recent years has left a bad taste around IT career futures and given the ICT ‘brand’ a bad name - this needs to be addressed.”

Dr Nicol said Australia was in real danger of falling off the world stage if it did not commit to growing a competitive technology industry.

‘Six years ago, Australian universities had a relatively healthy intake of domestic students into IT courses,” Dr Nicol said. According to the Department of Education Science and Training, Higher Education Reports 2001-2005, as much as 7 per cent of students commenced IT studies at tertiary institutions. “Since then, the numbers have gone backwards markedly, with as little as 3 per cent of total students enrolling in IT courses in 2005.”

Dr Nicol said that companies are already having difficulty finding the right talent and the situation will get worse as graduate numbers continue to fall over the next few years.

Australia is already underperforming in the area of ICT exports. While Australia increased its spend on ICT as a percentage of GDP by almost 2 per cent over 2000-2005, much of this comes from imports such as PlayStations, TVs and other gadgets.

“Our exports have dropped and we haven’t kept up with other comparable OECD economies such as Ireland, Japan and Korea. For example, Ireland has approximately the same level of ICT imports, but exports over ten times more ICT than Australia,” Dr Nicol said.

Dr Nicol believes Australia needs to reposition the ICT industry within the community. “Most of our kids are interacting in virtual communities, playing complex computer games, manipulating multi-media wireless messages and downloading music over the Internet, and yet there appears to be a level of disinterest amongst young people in pursuing careers in ICT.”

The central nervous system within most of these systems are Embedded Systems. Over 98 per cent of computer processor chips are embedded in products – not in PCs. “In ten years from now high-end automobiles will have about 600 embedded processors in them – executing billions of lines of software – how many are we going to develop in Australia?”

“We still have a good chance to change things, provided government, industry, education and media join forces to help restore faith in the industry and develop a national ICT brand,” Dr Nicol said.