10Oct 06
Skills in short supply
Posted by Steven Deare @ 12:05 5 comments
My interview with the government's ICT skills and professional development taskforce last week shed new light on what skills exactly are in short supply.
Taskforce chair Patrick Callioni has certainly formed some concrete views of the issue since the group formed almost 12 months ago in response to the looming shortfall. His taskforce recently launched a couple of initiatives it's banking on to stem the flow of IT talent elsewhere.
So what skills are the government looking for? SAP? .NET? Siebel?
In truth, Callioni did name these technologies as areas where the government needed more skilled workers.
However, they were not the first skills he named.
Instead there was an emphasis on finding and nurturing "the softer skills" in IT professionals, as Callioni put it.
These were career management, networking with colleagues, and project management.
The taskforce's women in IT executive mentoring program seeks to develop exactly these skills in mid-management employees it has identified as having great potential.
Developing softer skills in IT recruits was also a main aim of the government's new IT apprenticeships scheme, according to Callioni. If the government could attract IT workers early in their career, it had more chance to mould and shape them with the skills it needed, so the taskforce's reasoning goes.
The government needed to fill positions in project management, business analysis and contract management, said Callioni. All are positions where the softer skills come to the fore.
Could it be that in the whole skills shortage issue we've simplified what skills are lacking?
If you're an IT employer, is it really that hard to find someone with SAP or .NET skills, or is it the business acumen that needs to go with them that applicants generally lack?
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As the skill shortage becomes more apparent, people start asking why. Various arguments are put forward and it's usually the IT staff that take the blame.
But people rarely talk about the conditions that IT professionals work under. The deadlines are extremely short, the hours long and the technologies are constantly changing and increasing in complexity. In short, it can be very hard work. As a consequence people have left the industry or are avoiding entering it in the first place. (This is especially true for people with families or plans to start one.)
To use an analogy, if your car had broken down, you look to a mechanic to fix it. They would decide the work needs to be done and they would tell you how long it will take and how much it would cost. Yet in the IT industry the business decides what needs to be done, when it needs to be done by and what the budget will be. And often the managers making the decision don't understand the technical issues involved.
So if business really wants to do something about the shortage of IT skills, it should look a little closer to home. Chances are your IT staff are working hard enough.