If the UK hopes to become a high-tech centre for business to rival the US, more efforts must be made to ensure there are enough IT graduates in the workforce, a new report argues.

Gordon Frazer, the managing director of Microsoft UK, claims, in the forward to the Developing The Future 2007 report, that businesses and the government must look at ways of producing more IT professionals for the UK to prosper in the future.

"The supply of IT graduates must increase to reflect the UK's shift to a knowledge economy," Mr Frazer writes.

"Schools must also ensure that crucial computing skills are made available to all at GCSE level as well as at A-level and beyond."

"Industry must also work in concert with academia and government to ensure that UK citizens can constantly refresh their skills throughout their working lives."

Elsewhere in the report, it was found that only 30 per cent of IT graduates choose to pursue a related career.

Equally, the report identified a lack of female IT workers in the market, writing: "Despite numerous industry initiatives, currently only around 20 per cent of the UK's IT workforce is female.

"If it is to fill its skills gap, the IT industry needs to recruit from the entire talent, not merely the masculine half."