The growth of Internet start-up companies in Britain is being
stifled by an increasing shortage of skilled IT staff, members of
the influential First Tuesday club for Internet entrepreneurs have
revealed.
Dotcom companies are struggling to find senior IT staff with the
right business experience to act as chief technology officers for
their companies, First Tuesday members have confirmed.
Competition between the dotcoms and traditional companies to
findr senior IT staff has intensified in the first few weeks of the
year as traditional companies begin pushing ahead with e-commerce
projects.
"Where dotcom companies are really having trouble is finding
chief technical officers," said Toby Reynolds, director of
Clickmango, an Internet-based health business. "A lot of the people
who found dotcom companies think they can simply go out and find a
CTO, but it's not something you can get off the shelf."
Keith Phillips, CTO of Internet auction company QXL.com, said
demand for CTOs is so intense he is receiving several offers a week
urging him to join rival firms.
Recruitment consultants say the shortage is two-fold because the
pool of people with the right experience to become a CTO with an
Internet start-up company is small, and the Web industry itself is
less than two years old.
"There is a lack of people who have sufficient experience of
business who understand how to put together e-commerce projects and
the technology behind them," said Simon Crockett, operations
director at recruitment agency Michael Page Technology. "The pool
of candidates is tiny."
"The people the dotcom companies are looking for don't exist, "
said Philip Virgo, strategic advisor to the Institute for the
Management of Information Systems. He urged dotcom companies to
consider hiring 40- or 50-year-olds with EDI experience as CTO's
rather than trawling the tiny pool of people with Web
experience.