Public sector organisations often use the same sorts of IT systems as their private counterparts: enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to manage back-end functions, for example, and content management systems as platforms for providing web-based access to organisational documents.
Just like the private sector, therefore, the public sector is crying out for IT specialists in particular areas, such as SAP, Microsoft .Net and Java.
The public sector is also starting to look more and more like the private sector in the way it deploys and manages IT, and that has an impact on the kinds of skills it requires.
Recent years have seen an increased spend on IT, particularly in the area of egovernment, and most of those projects have been subcontracted to private sector companies.
The modern local authority or NHS trust requires strategists – people who can manage software development projects or outsourcing relationships – rather than technicians or support staff.
The difficulty for the public sector is that these kinds of people are hard to attract.
‘The public sector is not suited to employing IT staff, who tend to be very well-remunerated on very short contracts,’ says James Adams, senior analyst at research firm Datamonitor.
‘The classic IT contractor does not work on a very long-term, very poorly-paid contract – they work on short-term, highly-paid contracts.’
Adams points out that the public sector tends to prize constancy over ‘flashier’ skills, which means that ambitious risk-takers are usually more attracted to the private sector.
A recent bulletin from e-Skills UK, the sector skills council for IT and telecoms, showed that public sector IT staff earn about £570 per week – some £90 per week less than those in the private sector.
Yet this view of the public sector as the poor relation may be outdated: the bulletin also showed that the proportion of IT professionals employed in the public sector has increased from 11 per cent in 2001 to 14 per cent in 2005.
Karen Price, chief executive of e-Skills UK, believes that the public sector is changing.
‘The creation of the post of chief information officer (CIO) for government and the work the government is doing around professionalising IT is beginning to make a significant difference,’ she says.
‘It is really raising the profile of working in the public sector and in IT, because while there are differentials in things such as salaries, there are better benefits and a lot more training goes on in the public sector.’
Price’s view of the benefits is supported by last year’s National Employer Skills Survey, which shows that 90 per cent of public sector employers – those covered by Government Skills, a sector skills council – train their staff, compared with the UK average of 67 per cent.
And 95 per cent of public sector employers provide staff with an annual performance review, compared with the UK average of 58 per cent.
The public sector also seems to fare better in attracting women to IT roles – 32 per cent of the IT professional workforce in the public sector is female, compared with 19 per cent in the IT professional workforce across all sectors, according to a recent Labour Force Survey.
Sarah Burnett, senior research analyst at Butler Group, is cautiously optimistic.
‘It has always been the case of the public sector not being able to recruit highly qualified people – but it has changed slightly since the recent recession, and the public sector has spent a lot of money doing egovernment,’ she says.
Recognising the importance of IT in its drive to improve efficiency in the public sector, the government has appointed a director of IT professionalism, Katie Davis.
Davis has just introduced a fast-track career option, known as Technology in Business Fast Stream, for IT professionals in the civil service. In the past, says Price, IT was not considered important enough to have a fast-track stream.
The idea is to attract talented graduates interested in delivering technological improvements in the public sector. Such graduates will be selected for their potential to become future chief information officers.
While the IT skills shortage is a long-running saga in both the private and public sectors, it is just possible that top-down initiatives such as these may have an impact on how IT professionals view the prospect of a public sector career.
‘Whereas public sector IT in terms of skills was seen as a second-rate, second class place to work, I am beginning to see the public sector workplace show the private sector a clean pair of heels,’ says Price.
Autor(en)/Author(s): Kim Thomas
Quelle/Source: Computing, 15.02.2007
