Companies want cheap labour, universities depend on international student dollars, industry needs key skills, and local graduates just want a job. Mark Wheeler investigates the drama playing out over the ICT labour market.
The debate is sharpening over IT skills in Australia. With deficiencies in certain specialist segments, the industry is facing some problems in addressing the shortfall. Most commentators, however, suggest that despite these evolving difficulties IT is coping -- and by comparison better than most other sectors.
What is apparent is that the IT sector is grappling with rapidly changing supply and demand for skills that are becoming increasingly specialised and diverse. Differing agendas have also emerged, and where solutions have appeared, those agendas have created problems.
Surplus or shortage?
If you ask analysts, IT associations, or recruitment companies, the answers come swiftly and consistently -- there is a skills shortage, but only in key "pocket" areas. In other areas we seem to be in surplus. According to a 2004 Department of Workplace Relations (DEWR) ICT skills survey, there is no national skills shortage. The number of suitable applicants per ICT vacancy actually rose marginally from 5.5 to 5.8 nationally. Bob Kinnaird, a Sydney-based labour market analyst suggests that "the figures are consistent with an IT labour market in general oversupply, balance at best -- certainly not a generalised shortage."
Indeed a common observation is that our universities are "pumping out" graduate programmers and we are having real problems finding work for them all. An Australian Computer Society (ACS) survey released in May highlighted that in 2004, 22.2 percent of programmers were unemployed -- far above the national average. That said, in key skill sets there is a clear shortage of available workers.
Bob Kinnaird
Over the past few years, business intelligence professionals and project managers have seen a rise in demand says Turner. "Companies are spending less money on IT than they used to, and so the people who are governing that area of IT -- the CIOs and CFOs -- have to be smarter. They are relying on people who can get in there and start looking for the problems to sort things out.
"IT is much more being viewed as a utility. It is a reflection that the IT community is waking up to the needs of the business. It's all about aligning IT to the business theory. If you employ BA's (business analysts), they can review your internal processes and streamline things," Turner says.
"If you look at outsourcing, where you're re-establishing the way the workflows are happening you need it to be tightly controlled. A good project manager is worth their weight in gold."
Similarly, security technology has boomed over the past few years, and with the expanding niche has come an increase in demand for related skills, particularly in network security, risk management, and certified information systems security professionals (CISSP).
6%
1%
Migrants are attacted by the life style in Australia. Growth opportunities are limited given the size of the market and high labor costs. Local IT companies who make a name for themselves are seldom mentioned in the Australian IT press. Brain drain out of Australia, is a definite possiblity as a result of no recognition and no growth opportunities.
In the end, mission critical applications will remain local, while the rest will be offshored.