The IT skills shortage we have to have

| February 17, 2009

Why fall over ourselves attempting to make IT look sexy for young people, while systematically excluding those who actually want to work?

 

While I applaud the efforts of the ACS, especially of the ACS foundation to provide the opportunity for young people to get involved in IT, it’s an approach which has consistently failed to actually make a difference to the ongoing shortage of IT skills in this country.

It’s counterproductive attempting to tell young people that IT is really “cool”, because no one goes into a career because it’s cool – people adopt a career path because it is accessible, practical, safe and then maybe because it’s also lucrative.

Unfortunately the IT industry has adopted a number of practices which have ensured a career in IT is none of these things for many of the people who come to this country specifically to work in this area.

The first challenge is the certification vs experience quandary faced by just about anyone who’s attempted to break into the industry at any level. IT teams simply aren’t prepared to train staff, they aren’t prepared to take on staff without two years of experience, and they aren’t prepared to offer work experience or conduct skills-based recruitment. The programs that exist are all focussed on recent graduates ignoring the fact that successive waves of migrants have been brought into the country supposedly because we need their IT skills.

People with the experience are often disqualified on the basis they lack the certification, people with the certification are disqualified on the basis they lack experience – and the CIO keeps moaning that they can’t get the staff.

Older applicants, mature age students and migrants are consistently overlooked leaving good people out of work or forcing them into other industries. I know network engineers who are driving taxis, and programmers who are working on factory lines or as cleaners because they don’t have access to the social networks through which most recruitment occurs.

To exacerbate this access problem, IT departments place excessive emphasis on the use of recruitment agencies – staffed by recruitment agents who blindly read off requirements but lack the skills to a certain whether or not the candidate can actually perform the task.

This approach creates a virtually insurmountable access problem for older, retrained or migrant IT professionals.

Why fall over ourselves attempting to make IT look sexy for young people, while systematically excluding those who actually want to work.

The other challenge for the industry is the casual nature of many of the jobs on offer. I know many people who have left the industry because they were tired of moving from contract to contract without being able to plan for the long term.

IT teams need to be prepared to take certified professionals without experience, they need to create career progression and planning and they need to take recruitment process back in house, and they need to create full time permanent positions rather than relying on casual and contract staff.

The only skills shortage is the one the industry brought upon itself.

Access, stability and career progression – sort it out and you’ll find the staff you need.

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0 Comments

  1. sally.rose

    February 19, 2009 at 12:49 am

    Recruitment Agencies Again

    There have been a number of themes running through the blogs and comments in the Exciting Careers in IT forum and one of them has definitely been that the trend towards using recruitment agencies is creating a blockage rather than facilitating a flow of employees as it is intened to do.  They're expensive too. Why are they remaining so popular?

  2. JEQP

    February 24, 2009 at 6:19 am

    Just a guess…
    I'm going to hazard a guess that they're popular because most IT managers are promoted from the IT ranks without any training in managing people or running a team, and are horrified at the idea of meeting hundreds of strangers.