Chronic under-investment in IT training has created a seller's market for skills, says John Hutchinson
A LONDON-BASED international investment bank which has just spent £100,000 on an advertising campaign to recruit information technology staff with particular skills received just one reply. The case is cited by recruitment specialist Jon Stewart to show how difficult it has become to find the right people for specific IT posts and he sees it as exemplifying how British companies have jeopardised their futures by producing a skills shortage through chronic under-investment in IT.
"In the recession of the early 1990s, industry made IT people redundant and stopped investment in graduate recruitment," he recalls. "The result was that there were no new people coming up, and those who stayed put became unenthusiastic because there was no career path for them. This has produced a real dearth of skills."
But in the past two years the job market for IT specialists has exploded, given the combination of renewed economic activity and the desperate demand for the new technical aristocracy capable of fixing millennium compliance problems. Suddenly, graduates with only a couple of years' experience in the right areas can demand £50,000 a year or more, and employers are queuing to sign them.
Stewart, director of ASA, an IT recruitment firm at Walton on Thames, Surrey, explains: "The contract market has boomed, but companies have been left with huge chasms in their IT staffs. There are still too few people coming up through training schemes and many employers are having to take on staff with fewer skills than they need."
He believes there is a swing back from contracts towards permanent IT employment, which is being driven by the desire of both IT personnel and companies for greater security.
But the jobs market will stay dangerously volatile - and skills shortages will proliferate - unless organisations take steps to develop new generations of IT specialists.
"The only way to future-proof a company's IT personnel resources," Stewart says, "is to start low down the chain, paying well to attract the best recruits and bringing them on with investment in training and career development. If people are going to stay with a company they must believe they have a future with the organisation."
Recruitment of IT specialists is an exacting process because of the highly specific nature of the skills required, Stewart argues. In many cases, he believes, in-house human resource departments don't know how to attract and select the right people.
His company - one of several specialists in the field - maintains a database of 35,000 IT personnel available for either contract or permanent employment at a variety of levels.
An alternative recruitment strategy is to use head-hunters to track down people with other companies and lure them away.
Whatever method is preferred, however, Stewart believes companies must increasingly focus on training and development if the skills shortages are not to become chronic.
