'"Yes, for some of our roles we’ll continue to need those with a Doctorate in Mathematics or Computer Science, but we also need people straight from school or those who want a career change. People who can lead and make decisions," he concluded.'
Neither of those requirements give me any confidence he's grasped what needs doing and what skilled are required.
Yep, having good crypto people is required. But thats best done as research. Until someone cracks large primes then the current set of breaking the current crypto tech is as likely as turning an omelette back into eggs.
The bulk of the work and skills required is finding people who've done a lot of software - OSes, protocols, large scaled distributed systems/phone networks.
And by a lot, I mean 10+ years of grunt work.
You wont find these people in academia or 'straight out of school'. As a rough n ready guess, I think the number of the UK citizens with 5+ years of C + OS + network + assembler is somewhere less than 10k.
Sadly there appears to be a very long queue of people looking for these people as everyone's decided that whatever their business is, its going to use a lot of software.
This is made worse as the IT bust of 2000, followed by 'outsource to India!' has lost a generation of software people.
Oh, and beardly hipsters re-writing their 100th javascript library wont really help you.