A revolutionary development programme to fast-track the careers of new IT professionals has been announced by e-skills UK, the employer-led Sector Skills Council for IT and Telecoms.

The Masters’ level programme will unite universities and employers to increase training, while minimising time away from work.

Karen Price, CEO e-skills UK, said that many traditional entry-level IT roles are disappearing from the UK due to offshoring and technological advances.

“At the same time, increasing numbers of IT professional roles in the UK are becoming focused on highly skilled, customer-focused areas such as project management, business analysis and solutions design,” she said.

“This means that new IT professionals must be able to progress rapidly to demanding roles without access to the kind of jobs that would help them to build their skills and experience: they have to climb a career ladder with the bottom rungs missing. Our new programme will help to bridge this gap, enabling graduate recruits to build a strong foundation of competence in the early years of their career. It will make a real difference to new IT professionals and their employers.”

Companies backing the programme include Accenture, Aviva, BA, BBC, BT, Carphone Warehouse, Cable and Wireless, Cisco, EDS, Fujitsu, Government, HP, IBM, LogicaCMG, Microsoft, Oracle, Reuters, Royal Mail, Sainsburys, UBS, Unilever, Vodafone and Whitbread. Universities include Cranfield, Lancaster University Management School, Manchester Business School, the Open University and UCL.