Julie Wall, Senior Lecturer at University of East London has a call to action in order to solve both the talent gap and diversity issues in financial services and technology.

“The search for talent is a big challenge at the moment. There is going to be a skills shortage, but I am optimistic that it can be met. For every one woman there’s about three men and that’s in over 50% of tech companies. If there is going to be a skills shortage, and there is a skill shortage now, then we there is another solution.  We need to bring women into this industry.

More has to come from industry that has to come from academia to encourage this. We have large student numbers. We’ve large admissions every year. We get more and more admissions and we have a very high satisfaction rate with the students that we have. We want to make sure that they have a career, they have a future.

For that we need this collaboration between universities academia and industry – a two-way partnership. Industry wants to have really you know well-rounded really well skilled students to do this they need work experience. I think it’s a two-way thing that if we provide excellent students industry comes to us and says yeah we’ll take them on for 70 hours or three months. That, I think, is another way to solve this ghost gap.

Financial services has been at the crux of the AI/Big Data revolution. These subjects are the really exciting ones. When you teach it [to students] and they see the careers they could have it really does excite them. Financial services/FinTech – this area is a really good destination for our students.”