Last week Xtra! asked why IT employers feel entitled to demand ever
more from job candidates. This week ITers answer back and explain
why they feel firms have gone too far. Roisin Woolnough
reports
Heard the one about a Windows 2000 job requiring an IT professional
with five years' experience? Or the software house looking for
someone with expertise in SAP, .net, HTML, ASP, XML, DHTML, Java
and Oracle, plus some PL/SQL and dotcom experience thrown in for
good measure? OK, so they might not be jokes you would tell down
the pub, but ITers say employers must be having a laugh with some
of the requirements being put out at the moment.
Readers have been complaining to Xtra! that employers are asking
for people with expertise in far more skills than is feasible. And
not just that, they also want people with years of experience
behind them, commercial exposure and high-level science or maths
degrees. Seasoned IT contractor Chris Moden says the situation is
now so bad that employers might as well be asking for the moon.
"So many job adverts these days are just unreal," he says. "You see
adverts asking for x number of years' experience in a skill, but it
has only been out for six months. And you often see adverts where
they want someone with eight skills. It is a wish list, because
people can only really be expert in one or two skills and very good
in another couple, with bits and pieces of other languages and
techniques."
Phil Newman, a Citrix consultant, agrees. "If they mean expert,
then you can only be expert at two or three skills at the very
most. Any more and you wouldn't be effective."
Newman thinks it is impossible for any one person to have a solid
understanding of numerous skills, let alone be a specialist in all
of them. Should anyone be able to prove him wrong, he says he would
wonder about how they had managed to acquire all that knowledge.
"You would end up with someone who knows a reasonable amount about
each thing, but has no social skills."
It is not just senior-level positions either. There are numerous
job adverts asking for entry-level graduates that require them to
have knowledge of several skills and proof that they have
successfully used those skills in the business environment. "You
see adverts for a graduate programmer, for example, asking for good
experience of Excel, Java, NT, SQL, plus some Solaris and HP-UX,"
says Hugh McNeill, a contractor specialising in Unix and network
architecture. "There is no way a graduate will come through from
university with all those skills."
Learning a new language or operating system properly takes time and
application. It is not as simple as enrolling on a course and
absorbing all the information. ITers need to apply that knowledge
in a real environment and spend at least 18 months getting to grips
with it before they can really claim to be proficient.
Moreover, the learning doesn't stop there. Because of the
ever-changing nature of IT, individuals need to keep updating their
skills and applying their knowledge in new ways. "There is a
limited set of technical skills that any one person can keep up to
date with," says John Eary, head of the skills source consultancy
at the National Computing Centre. "Otherwise you end up being a
jack of all trades and master of none."
When employers put these job specifications together, Newman thinks
they cannot really expect to find candidates with all the skills
listed. "I suspect it is more of a filtering device. It is still
difficult to get decent staff, even in the current market, and I
suspect employers want to reduce the number of applications they
receive."
By doing this, however, employers might be missing out on
potentially excellent candidates who will not apply for a job
unless they fit the specified criteria.
Eary thinks people should not necessarily be put off if they see a
job advert that lists six skills and they have only four of them.
It often happens that skilled IT professionals are invited in for
interview, even if they are short of a skill or two. "Employers can
ask for lots of skills, but whether they actually get what they are
asking for is another matter," he says. "They often have to
compromise if they are being unrealistic."
In this situation, Eary advises candidates to play on their
strengths, but without pretending they know more than they do. "Do
not try to pretend you know the additional skills if you don't. The
chances are that the other candidates won't know them all either,
and if you try to overclaim on what you have, you will be found
out."
IT professionals are used to learning about new technologies while
they work, and as long as you can prove you have a broad base of
knowledge and are capable of picking up new skills, that may
satisfy the interviewer. After all, once a project is under way,
people tend to deploy only one or two skills most of the time. "You
usually use one or two skills for 80% of the time and other skills
only 20% of the time," says Moden.
The trick is to persuade your potential employer that you have what
it takes to do the job and can learn any additional skills when
required.
Are employers asking for too much?
The following
demanding job specs have been advertised in the past month.
Application developer: Java and Oracle
Young, dynamic
team environment looking for high-calibre Web developers. Must have
experience of programming in multi-threaded and TCP environments,
object-oriented design, Java, JSP, JDBC and XML. Weblogic version
6.1 cluster running under Windows 2000 Advanced Server development
and deployment experience essential. Oracle 9i/8i cursors,
exception handling, stored procedures, ER modelling and database
design and additional performance tuning essential.
IT developer (MQ series)
Requirement for a highly
skilled developer with excellent skills in component design, design
patterns, object-oriented analysis, Rational Rose, UML, Swift/Neon,
Sun Solaris, Unix, SQL, Unix Shell Korn and MQ series.
Java developer
Blue chip company requires highly
skilled candidates with Java, J2EE, EJB, JSP, Javascript, Perl,
CGI, BEA Weblogic and XML.