E-commerce boom is fuelling demand for staff with Internet and
web-related skills Bill Goodwin
Employers are shunning staff with traditional IT skills in
favour of Internet and Web programming skills as more companies
re-orientate their IT departments towards e-commerce.
Demand for staff with Java, HTML, and XML skills rose
dramatically during the first three months of the year, straining
an over-stretched labour market, the latest Computer
Weekly/SSP analysis of job advertising reveals.
At the same time, the IT industry has seen the most dramatic
downturn in demand for traditional IT skills. The number of IT jobs
advertised fell from 59,000 in the first quarter of 1999 to 32,000
in the first quarter this year, the largest fall in a decade.
The rising demand for e-commerce staff is placing renewed
pressure on employers to retrain traditional IT workers with the
latest skills. It will also persuade employers to turn in
increasing numbers to application service providers, rather than to
attempt projects in house.
The number of jobs advertised for Internet specialists
practically doubled to 3,600 in the first three months of the year
compared to 1,236 at the same time in 1999. Over the same period
the number of advertisements for HTML skills rose by 139% and for
Java by 33%.
IT professional and training bodies have responded to the
survey's findings by urging employers to begin investing in
training to create home-grown e-commerce specialists, rather than
relying on the increasingly overstretched labour market.
"Not enough employers are training their own people. This should
encourage existing staff to stay and cut down on recruitment costs.
Employers are worried about the high cost of training, yet they
tolerate their staff leaving and high recruitment costs," said John
O'Sullivan director of Alliance for Information Systems Skills.
"It needs employers and individuals to commit on training and
investment. When DB2 was in demand, employers took their IT
professionals and retrained them. It should be the same with
e-commerce," said David Pinto, national operations director for
Computer People.
Philip Virgo, strategic advisor to the Institute for the
Management of Information Systems, said that long-serving staff
with expertise in mainframes and systems analysis would be ideally
placed for retraining in e-commerce skills.
For the first time, demand for client/server skills has fallen
significantly reflecting the moratorium imposed by many employers
after completing their Y2K work.
The number of Windows jobs fell by 75% from 4,000 to just over
1,000. Advertised Windows NT jobs fell by 63% from 10,000 to 4,000
and the number of Visual Basic jobs halved from 7,000 to 3,200.
Lowdown on skills and salaries