Unlocking Potential: Creating New Pathways Into Tech Careers

The skills shortage behind this piece is a specific and fairly stark one: Gallagher Security's 2026 report found staffing and skills shortages are the top challenge for 24% of security channel partners, and separate analysis from the Institution of Engineering and Technology shows demand for engineering roles now far outstrips what the traditional entry pipeline, largely school-leaver apprenticeships and engineering degrees, can supply. The shortage is especially acute in fire, emergency, safety and security engineering, roles that rarely get much airtime in general tech-careers coverage.

Helen Sussex, a Learning & Development Business Partner at North with more than 30 years across technical, IT and consulting roles, argues the industry's assumptions about the "right" way into these careers are actively excluding capable people. Her evidence is North's own Advance@North programme, which launched as a genuinely small pilot in mid-2025 with just two participants and grew to seven between September 2025 and January 2026, still a modest scale, but a deliberate one: this reads as a programme being tested carefully before being scaled, not a headline initiative built for a press release.

The programme's structure leans specifically on real-world learning over classroom teaching: supervised on-site experience, dedicated one-to-one mentoring, and structured milestone tracking, aimed at candidates who already have some work experience and are changing careers rather than school leavers starting from zero. It leads into roles like maintenance and installation engineer, solidly technical positions that don't require a traditional engineering degree to enter.

The participant backgrounds are the most telling detail: one came from a different trade apprenticeship plus outside work experience, another was a former Armed Forces member who had already retrained but was still struggling to find a role that would take that retraining seriously. What they had in common wasn't a shared CV template, it was willingness to learn, adaptability and follow-through, which is precisely Sussex's point: candidate screening built around "does your CV look like our usual hire" filters out exactly the traits that predict success in this kind of role.

Her wider argument, that widening the candidate pool strengthens industry standards rather than diluting them, is worth taking seriously given how narrow the traditional entry route into engineering roles has become relative to actual demand. A shortage this specific isn't going to be solved by more people doing the same three-year degree route, it needs more entry points that recognise capability built outside the standard pipeline.