Misery or myth?
- Posted:
- 12:23 25 Jun 2001
- Topics:
- IT Workforce
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.
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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.
