Is there an IT skills shortage? In a recent Thought for the Day
piece, CW360.com columnist Colin Beveridge asked to see the
evidence, and concluded that it was almost certainly a figment of
the collective imagination.
Many readers agree, as shown by the selection of e-mails below.
Others suspect there may be a skills shortage but also regret the
lack of dependable statistics.
Read Colin Beveridge's piece on the skills crisis
>>Here's what our readers say:
I agree with Colin. It is very important to get hard facts and I
believe the true picture is quite the reverse of a skills crisis -
IT professionals are suffering from an unprecedented bad
situation.
A lot of the problems stem from the fact that many of the people
involved - employers and politicians - don't understand the field,
especially its high speed of change. If you advertise for
25-year-olds with two years experience of .net at an annual salary
of £20,000, you won't get many takers.
Employers must:
- stop their ageist practices
- understand that generic skills are more important than specific
ones
- train staff
- be prepared to pay rates that reflect the quality of the people
they are hiring.
The Government's actions over IR35 and fast-track visas have
greatly worsened the situation. Contractors have always been the
first to get on their bikes and adapt to the market and they have
been badly hit by the vindictive IR35 which treats them as
employees until they need the protection of employee status and
ties their hands in dealing with big business.
The fast-track visa scheme has been a godsend to employers who want
to pay as little as possible. I don't know of any plans to
fast-track low-cost Asian lawyers, despite the rates in that
profession - too many lawyers in Parliament, I guess.
Of course the lower that employers force rates by bringing in
low-wage people, the fewer British graduates will want to join the
profession, so there is the danger of a real shortage occurring in
future.
Peter Croft
If there is a skills shortage, it's not helping me. I have a degree
in Computing and Information Systems, from which I gained a
placement year on IT Support.
But I won't have the experience I need until I can get a job. I
want to get into systems or Web development, yet they all want two
or more years' experience. I feel as if the debt I have got myself
into for my degree and the degree itself is now worthless. I also
feel that if I am not employed and trained soon, then I will be out
of the game by the time things pick up.
There are so many graduates in my position and hardly any jobs to
go round unless you go to London. Some of us can't afford
London.
Melanie Williams
The skills shortage is a myth. It is perpetuated by HR departments
which specify five years' experience for a language that may have
only been around for two years. They then shout about a skills
crisis.
It is further perpetuated by employers that are inflexible. For
example, they might insist on a set of skills nobody would have in
the hope they can employ one person instead of three. Or be too
rigid on what experience is required for a particular job by, say,
insisting on Visual Basic Version 6 experience rather than Version
5, regardless of an individual's ability to rapidly learn a
particular skill.
For a person with a broad base of experience in different technical
skills, picking up a new skill takes a matter of weeks or even
days.
Part of the definition of the skills shortage is also that an
employer cannot get a particular skill for a particular price.
Adverts offering £10 per hour are not unknown, but this rate is
less than what a newly qualified nurse is paid.
There is yet another factor. Some individuals have become very
wealthy by filling in jobs with Indian workers. By bringing Indian
workers into the UK, who are not aware of the costs of living in
the UK, they have managed to get 100% to 200% mark-up on the rate
they pay to those people.
I suspect that much of the politicking is to do with making IT a
vocation, as opposed to a profession. IR35 is certainly making it
that way.
F. O. Allan
It is a myth!
I was made redundant at the end of January 2002, from a small
company that was running out of cash having found little new
business over the previous year. I have 30 years of IT experience,
including much current experience of Microsoft Office and operating
systems, communications and databases. I specialise in document and
knowledge management.
I am still trying to get a permanent job. I have applied for many,
had a few interviews, but no success yet. Each time I've asked
about the "competition" I've been told there were around 300 other
applicants.
I also keep hearing about companies that are subcontracting work to
teams in India and the Far East where wages are low. As a result,
I'm now considering jobs at salaries lower than I was earning 15
years ago - without taking inflation into account!
Thank you for an excellent article, I totally agree with
Colin.
John Tomlinson
I support Colin's thoughts that there is little
evidence of skills verification in the UK. I encourage companies to
assess and verify the IT skills within their organisations because
my company provides bespoke software that achieves this.
However, it is always a shock to discover how little is known about
ICT skill deficiencies within the organisation.
Even the NHS, which proclaims that 22% of its workforce have no IT
experience and 53% have poor or limited skills, is unable to
validate these facts from objective skills assessments.
The scenario is the same wherever I go: there is no systematic
skills assessment in place to identify skill deficiencies, which
means that any development plans that may exist are useless.
Fiona Hudson-Kelly
What skill shortages?
Just a short while ago, the company where I work for shed some 30%
of the jobs and I just managed to survive the cull.
Despite having "in demand" skills such as J2EE, C++ and XML, I do
not see anyone rushing to offer me a job. I think it is a ploy by
big companies to import cheap overseas labour that they can
exploit.
Mohammad Negargar
To adapt Winston Churchill's saying: "Never in the field of
industry has so much been known by so few compared to so
many."
The perceived skills shortage is another example of an industry
where its left hand does not know what its right hand is doing.
It's frightening that there are so many people without appropriate
IT knowledge.
Imagine if all other UK industries were like IT. I hesitate to
think what this country would be like!
Stephen Jubb