Have you heard the one about the IT skills crisis? John Charlton
has and, joking apart, tells us why it is more of a pointless PR
stunt than the panic it's made out to be
Hands up anyone who 'brought their daughter to work' recently as
part of some pointless promotion to persuade teenage girls to take
up an IT career? Well, more nails on my pinkies than hands in the
air I would wager.
This was just another stunt by the
'Let's-do-something/anything-about-the-IT-skills-crisis' lobby
which enjoys more column inches in the IT trade press than even
William Gates III. The gesture was the latest in a long line of
useless 'initiatives' designed to grab easy headlines and some
profiling for those behind them. Indeed, given that IT clearly
attracts more males than females to its ranks it would have made
far more sense, from a cost-efficiency perspective, to have had a
'bring-your-spotty-son-to-work' day. But then that would have been
sexist, and the skills crisis busybodies can't be doing with that.
Of course, what underlies such stunts is the widely accepted view
that there is an IT skills crisis - a belief that is rarely
questioned.
Any reader who laboured in the salt mines of software development
in the early 1990s will recall just how quickly the then IT skills
crisis turned into the IT jobs slump as recession-hit organisations
dumped IT staff quicker than you can say ebXML.
Well, it looks like we're in for a repeat scenario, though you can
be sure that vested interests will still be squawking about a lack
of skilled IT staff holding back the e-revolution when recruitment
agencies are having to use bulldozers to shift CVs.
The IT media is as guilty as anyone in perpetuating the current IT
skills crisis myth. One IT weekly recently ran a front page story
about the 'skills crisis' while a lead on page two said that
advertised vacancies for IT staff had fallen over 40%
quarter-on-quarter. In reality, these two states cannot exist
together.
Typical of the 'skills crisis' industry is a recent comment by a
British Computer Society vice president referring to studies that
claim the UK IT industry will be short of 300,000 specialists by
2003. As ever in such items, there is no evidence as to where these
numbers came from. A Britney Spears' lyric, perhaps? Or an estimate
of the number of Manchester United fans in Bournemouth?
You may think that the most accurate estimate for the 'skills
crisis' would be a regular count of unfilled IT vacancies at given
times. And you'd be wrong. These numbers come from projections that
are typically based on 'models', comprised of opinions on IT
vacancy developments gathered from a few organisations, which are
then mixed with assumptions about economic growth patterns as well
as technological and organisational developments and - abracadabra
- out of this concoction comes the IT skills crisis.
The archetype of this model is not Kate Moss - and I have to say
here that I don't like her new look - but rather the annual
European Information Technology Observatory Report. Its 2001 report
made predictions based on said model, that there will be 7.4
million more ICT jobs in Western Europe over the next three years.
For the UK, it predicted an ICT skills shortage of 326,700, and an
e-business and call centre skills shortage of 291,800. With
remarkable insight, the EITO describes a call centre professional
as "anyone using the phone in a call centre".
If this were truly the case IT recruitment agencies would be
reporting growing revenues, IT magazines would be stuffed full of
job ads, websites ditto, and employers would be training talented
recruits in IT skills, and taking on those who have invested in
them. Dream On!
Since the turn of the year, advertisements for IT staff have
plummeted, agencies such as MSB and Glotel have announced falling
revenues, dotcoms have laid off IT staff, IT contractors have been
axed in droves in the City and employers are showing their usual
reluctance to train staff or take on trainees.
Can it be coincidence that Learning at Work Day, backed by the
Campaign for Learning, failed to attract one IT employer? Perhaps
it should have been called Earning at Work Day.
A correspondent, John Stevens, tells me he has followed guru advice
and spent a fortune on learning Java skills. Guess what? He can't
get a job in Java because he doesn't have actual work experience,
and he's been told that the market is saturated with Java
contractors. He's returned to his old skill set and found a
job.
But the 'skills crisis' could be worse. Over in the US, which has
also been suffering a 'skills crisis', some 51,564 Internet jobs
alone were cut in the first four months of 2001. US IT staff are
looking to the UK for work. And for thousands of Indian software
experts who are having to leave the US because of IT staff layoffs,
business to business has taken on a new meaning: Back to Bangalore.