According to a US survey, companies are still facing high voluntary departure rates and increasing shifting their focus towards retention, despite the economic downturn.
Internet, e-commerce and application development skills were among the most difficult to retain, the META Group survey found. "The data clearly indicates that those who don't aggressively court and develop IT staff through the downturn and into the long-term will find themselves in crisis mode," said survey author Maria Schafer.
META Group surveyed 600 US medium to large organisations. In addition to high voluntary departure rates, it also found these companies moving their focus more towards retention, and also looking at optimising human assets.
However, recruitment agencies are finding a slightly different scenario in Australia.
Grant Montgomery, managing director at search company EL.Consult, said that generally he would have thought that the time when it would be difficult to retain staff would be when there's plenty of work around. He credits this to more interesting projects and companies prepared to offer more money to get it done during boom times.
Montgomery said that, in terms of demand, e-commerce staff weren't so scarce in Australia. Although he said that both in e-commerce and Web design skillsets, people setting up their own businesses could drag those IT pros away from corporate roles.
But he doesn't believe that there companies would have difficulty getting staff if they needed them in the future. "As an industry I think IT has shown the ability in the past to respond to sharp increases in demand," Montgomery said.
"IT changes quite substantially--so whatever or whoever you're training now may not be the IT person you want in two or three year's time."
Montgomery also said that, while there had been a trend for some IT pros to move back to traditional areas, equally those people could respond by returning to the IT sector if there was an upturn.
Likewise, Henry Talbot, client services manager at IT&T job board JobNet, believes it's less of a factor in Australia.
However, he does believes Australian companies are more closely looking at HR resource allocation in their IT departments. -They've got to make sure they're used as effectively as possible, [particularly] in a downturn of technology projects."
