Does the ICT skills shortage exist? As is so often the case, answers to that question tend to start with “it all depends what you mean by …”
“There is an ongoing strong demand for ICT skills across many industry verticals. The NBN and high-speed broadband applications, mobility convergence, e-health, e-security and other initiatives continue to drive demand for ICT skills,” said Alan Patterson, CEO of the Australian Computer Society.
It should come as no surprise that there’s a lead time for people to develop technical skills in new areas. We’ve all seen (or at least heard about) job adverts asking for two years’ experience with a product that’s been out for less than 12 months, but putting that sort of thing aside, when a large number of organisations suddenly decide they need custom mobile applications, the existing pool of experienced developers is unlikely to be able to meet the demand and so rates get pushed up.
Think back around 15 years, when we saw a very similar situation with a sudden surge in demand for people who could build even a simple website, allowing them to command what now seem extraordinary rates. In a fairly short time the number of people with expertise in the field grew, and technology was brought to bear in the form of template-driven website generators.
According to Lisa Christy, Human Resources Director ANZ, SAP, the industry sees repeated periods with temporary skills shortages relating to specific technologies when “it’s quite challenging to find the right talent”. But the issue is often about competencies rather than technical expertise; for example, when looking for an architect that can have the right conversations with C-level executives.
So it’s not always about particular technical skills alone. Specific business knowledge is important for developers. You can’t take someone from the ATO and drop them into a job at the ANZ Bank without some initial loss of productivity, observed Bruce Craig, Country Manager at Micro Focus.
Fortunately for employers, any shortfall in specific technical skills is taken care of fairly quickly by market forces: if they can’t afford the going rates (even for those recruited from overseas, assuming visa requirements can be met), they can develop either an existing employee or a new hire that has related skills. At the same time, people are drawn to ‘hot’ areas and may find training on their own time and expense if they are confident of a return on investment.
The global financial crisis
IT spending was booming prior to the GFC, said Ken Hodge, Managing Director ANZ at Quest Software, leading to “dire predictions” of a skills shortage in Australia. But the ensuing disruption dramatically reduced demand, although certain skills still seemed in short supply. Fast-forward to the present, and the mining boom has led to ‘phenomenal’ demand for IT skills in Western Australia and Queensland. Fortunately for employers, the strong dollar makes it easier to buy skills in Europe and the US.
An Infosys spokesperson said the company plans to hire 260 people this year, but demand exceeds supply. Two-thirds of those jobs are senior positions with the expectation that candidates will bring an advanced degree and at least 10 years’ experience - notably in ERP, EAI, BPM or OCM (organisational change management), skills in specific products, and perhaps some experience in newer technologies such as cloud.
Professor Chris Pilgrim, Deputy Dean of the faculty of information and communications technology at Swinburne University of Technology, noted that the demand is for candidates with good quality skills. He believes that the tertiary sector and private providers generally deliver enough students to the job market, but employers are generally risk adverse and want to “cherry pick” the best. Good quality students with experience get jobs, he observed, but “there is a shortage of good quality graduates” when it comes to the interpersonal and problem-solving skills that employers look for.
Areas currently in strong demand include software engineering and network/internet security, but he predicts employers will increasingly seek candidates with a range of capabilities so they can be used in various areas across the organisation.
“There is a general ICT skills shortage,” said Andrew Kirker, Sales Director, Pacific at APC by Schneider Electric, although he did concede that did not extend to commonplace skills such as Windows desktop support and administration, which are in good supply (a situation also reported by MYOB’s Human Resources Manager Rachel Lehmann). However, data centre skills are thin on the ground and APC has multiple open positions, with “major shortages in Western Australia”.
“New Zealand hasn’t been too bad for us,” he said, but noted that Australia’s NBN rollout is draining New Zealand’s pool of telecoms and electrical staff.
This feature was inspired by a New Zealand reader’s report that his company had been adversely affected by a shortage of network skills in the country. Specifically, network service providers had taken significant periods of time to replace key workers that had left for greener pastures, causing headaches for the reader’s company. “No amount of SLAs help in such situations,” the reader said in an email.
But Paul Migliorini, Managing Director of BT Australasia, told Voice+Data that BT Australasia was experiencing no problems hiring technical staff - including network specialists - in the region, except for local shortages in Western Australia and Queensland caused by the mining boom. He ascribes the company’s ability to recruit and retain staff to the way it offers broad roles and interesting work, and an inclination to hire people whose current employers offered no career path to broader and more advanced roles.
Hodge sees shortages affecting higher-level positions (possibly a reflection of the way a proportion of lower-level jobs have been offshored), including business-savvy architects and good project managers.
De-skilling the workforce
“We have de-skilled the workforce over the last four or five years,” said Nick Mescher, CEO of UXC Consulting. What he’s talking about is over-specialisation. A project manager today is good at managing projects, he says, but that’s about as far as it goes - they lack associated skills such as vendor management and organisational change management. The demand for IT projects has increased dramatically over the last year, he says, but the skills aren’t there to deliver them.
He also noted a shortage of business analysts with specific domain expertise. The point is that there isn’t a general IT labour shortfall, rather a shortage of certain specific skills in the IT workforce.
Lehmann echoes that sentiment, saying MYOB finds it hard to recruit people experienced in the Agile methodology to fill positions as developers, quality assurance testers and business analysts. But she said it is easy to find .NET developers to work on the company’s older products where the traditional waterfall development model is still used.
Although MYOB has two offshore operations (one outsourced in India and one in-house in Malaysia for quality assurance, the maintenance of older products and other less challenging work), when it comes to “cutting-edge” work such as cloud development “we keep [it] here because that’s where we find the skillsets”, said Lehmann. The company plans to keep two-thirds of its development people in the Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland centres.
“We don’t have a lot of ‘straight out of university’ positions,” she said, but the company has had good experience with using student interns for technical writing projects and has offered full-time positions to some of them after graduation. It is also involved in an international internship scheme and has hired a high proportion of those interns. Furthermore, MYOB tries to promote internally, said Lehmann; for example, moving call centre staff with relevant interests into junior technical positions.
Another specific example comes from Craig, who says there is a COBOL skills shortage, even though “the world still revolves around COBOL”. More transactions are processed each day on systems written in COBOL than there are Google searches, he suggested.
Perhaps the most positive response came from David Jackman, Managing Director of Pronto Software. “The supposed [skills] shortage isn’t impacting us at all,” he told Voice+Data. The company added 16 staff last financial year and 19 the year before, but has only increased headcount by two in the light of the international financial situation.
Pronto doesn’t hire new graduates, looking instead for candidates with double degrees or skills in a particular domain such as warehousing as well as IT, so most recruits are over 30. The company is also more concerned about getting the right person (often on the recommendation of current employees) rather than just looking for a specific skillset.
But Jackman did note that 16 positions had turned over during the last six months. “It’s high for us,” he said, as the company only expects to lose that many staff in a full year. He suggests that Australians’ reaction to the financial gloom is to get on with business and only worry about what they can control, so if they’re not happy at work they’re still prepared to move on. “I’m not worried about a shortage of people,” he said, and suggested that the issue is sometimes that organisations become “negative employers of choice” (that is, candidates tend to avoid them rather than being drawn to whichever vacancies are available). This can happen because “people are demanding and expecting … to be treated as respected people”. Increasingly, “people these days reference-check their [potential] employer”, Jackman said.
He also points the finger at executives that aren’t doing enough to upskill their employees even when they know in advance that particular capabilities will be needed.
The ripples of offshoring
However, Ted Landau, Chair of The Executive Connection and a director of other companies, suggests that continued offshoring by the banks and telcos means “a flood of people will be available in the next 12 months”, so the supply of certain skills should increase. The question will be whether there will be any significant demand for those skills from other local employers.
In the longer term, offshoring will mean fewer ICT jobs in this part of the world, especially at the entry level, Landau said. This will lead to employers increasingly hiring younger people for their potential to become generalist managers rather than their immediate specialist skills, and it will become harder to find career paths that maintain the hands-on involvement with technology. For an increasing number of companies, IT will be about the management of technology providers rather than the management of technology.
But Landau maintains that outsourcing can only be effective if the person managing the process has a better understanding than the person delivering the services. One problem is to identify a Plan B for producing future IT managers and CIOs with such capability despite the drying up of local entry-level jobs, in case Landau’s strategy of hiring potential generalists proves inadequate.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Stephen Withers
Quelle/Source: Voice and Data, 15.02.2012
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