Although there are widespread global rumours of a 'slowdown' in the technology industries, the UK has more work than workers. The Department for Education and Employment (DFEE) has released to ZD Net Australia details of the technologies that are currently desperately seeking staff, these include; CRM and CTI specialists, Broadvision e-commerce tools, Java and Java Scripts, Oracle, Peoplesoft, Perl, SQL, Visual Basic as well as XML and DHTML.
Tom Smith, Director of recruitment specialists Networking People, explained that Unix and Polaris experts are also being sought by the British company for positions in New York.
Last year 708 Australians and 358 New Zealanders were granted permission to live and work in the British IT industry, a figure, which the DFEE feel will increase in 2001. -We deal with clients that require people that are in emerging areas, this creates a problem as these people may not necessarily be from around the corner, so we find them people from all over the globe and we have bought in people from Australia and New Zealand," Tom Smith said. He added that the company often sends consultants abroad to find the right level of recruits.
Smith said that Australians are popular with the British industry. -Of the people coming over, Australians are the most highly regarded, part of the reason is that they adapt culturally to the UK better than people from other parts of the world." Australian qualifications are also well regarded, -Their people (Australia's) are on the whole up-to-date with current skills," Smith said.
Although preferred, Networking people have noticed an industry culture problem with Australian workers, -The only problem is that the people are not used to dealing with the scale of large companies we have over here, there seems to be a lot of smaller companies out there and some people struggle to cope here," Smith said.
The DFEE has compiled a list of areas with employee shortages after consultation with various industry bodies, these include; Analyst Programmers, Business Analysts, Database Specialists, Network Specialists and Software engineers.
Smith believes Australian's are keen to come to the UK because; -From the conversations I have had, they (Australians) can do better financially and at the end of the day the type of experience that they can gain in an intense economy like ours is very useful. The complexities of the company scales are attractive and the aggressiveness is good and these people are looking for that."
