What can employers do to address the IT skills shortage?

[mota bhai 2,675]

As long as IT has existed, it’s been an important part of enterprises’ success, from supporting communications to securely storing important data.

But this has changed dramatically in recent years, and much more is now being expected of IT departments. The introduction of mobility, virtualization and the like, plus the proliferation of devices and operating systems within a given organization’s infrastructure, all mean that IT departments have a lot more responsibility.

According to CareerBuilder, IT jobs in the U.S. grew by 13 percent from 2002 to 2013 to match this growth in responsibility. However, the number of people who graduated with IT degrees dropped 11 percent in that same time frame, creating a fairly massive shortage of IT applicants. It’s no surprise that, today, of the three most difficult positions to fill in the U.S., two are in the IT space: engineers and programmers. But this isn’t just a problem of quantity. The IT skills shortage has actually been made worse by rapid technological evolution and a focus on low-level, “fire-fighting” work in the IT department.

First, as companies embrace digital and mobile technology, our existing IT skilled labor supply has failed to keep up. This is primarily the result of a lack of industry standardization from the start, both in technology and applications. With the sudden introduction of numerous new applications and functionality, every company, and perhaps every engineer, defined its own way of patching an application, programming a server or deploying a new service. Plus, with so much to be learned, many workers specialized and became siloed in their knowledge. Without a common language between them or any industry standardization, engineers became limited to very small spheres within IT, and still today, the IT industry lacks employees with a broad technical engineering understanding.

This deficiency of expertise is exacerbated by the fact that IT departments don’t provide employees with sufficient opportunities to develop their skills on the job. In fact, a study that IPsoft commissioned late last year found that IT staff are spending nearly a third of their time on low-level IT tasks such as responding to incidents and checking for errors. Not only is this a waste of time and talent, but it is extremely demotivating for employees. Why spend time learning new skills if they won’t be utilized? On the other hand, those IT engineers that have developed high-level qualifications find that they use, on average, only 47 percent of them in their current IT positions.

Something needs to change — that much is clear. With a growing gap between the demands of modern IT positions and the skill set of the existing workforce, compounded by the growing demands of technology in the business world, the skills shortage will only get worse if we continue down this path. But how can we reverse this trajectory?

An important part of the solution will be for organizations to invest in IT training and empower labor intelligence. While budgets have slowly been whittled down over the last decade, more and more executive boards are realizing this is not a lasting solution, and, in response, are freeing up resources to fund IT growth. Those resources will be used in a variety of functions, but most importantly, must be applied to developing IT engineers’ technical expertise. In particular, organizations should aim to expand the skill sets of higher-level engineers that can immediately add more value to a business and its bottom line. This will also enable a trickle-down effect in that trained senior engineers can then educate junior and incoming employees, further extending the reach of this training.

It’s also important that IT departments better manage increasingly complex infrastructure and multi-sourcing strategies, allowing engineering teams to focus their efforts on defining and applying innovative solutions to organizations’ most complex problems. Having a single expert system that behaves as an overarching framework across all systems and processes is one way of doing this. Expert systems can act as a layer of intelligence across an organization’s IT infrastructure, helping to move IT employees away from their individual silos by giving them visibility of the complete picture. Expert systems also provide an ITIL framework, enabling a practical structure for identifying, planning, delivering and supporting IT services. As a result, IT can rely on a more standardized approach, allowing engineers to deliver a higher quality of service for every platform.

By empowering IT employees with new training and knowledge, while also giving them the opportunity to apply their efforts to more complex tasks, we can hopefully create a more robust and motivated workforce to support the growing applications of technology. A strong and capable team of IT experts will be invaluable as more businesses buy into cloud environments, SDN and big data, among numerous technology trends. The investments in creating and supporting that team must come immediately.

http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/11/labor-intelligence-to-reverse-the-it-skills-shortage/

[GandD 5,966]

Hard to spend money when the year hasn't started yet. Derp derp, unless you're talking about money budgeted for 2014.

[mota bhai 2,675]

Oops. I meant 2013. See, this is why I work in IT. I'm stupid, I need a profession that lets me take mental health breaks throughout the day. If I was smarter I'd be doing a real job like flipping fries or washing dishes.

[GandD 5,966]

We can always hope bro. Oh and btw, an Indian in IT? How original.

[mota bhai 2,675]

GFY!

Some of us pump gas too ya know!

[GandD 5,966]

And doctors.

BTW, I bet the gas pumpers are too busy to post on VJ too. So, that's always a good goal.

[mota bhai 2,675]

Gas stations are true patriots.

[GandD 5,966]

All joking aside, this is a pretty accurate article. We have a similar situation in our Department. I really like where I work because I don't have to specialize in one thing. I work on lots of different things on different days. Its cool for providing an interesting work day but makes me fairly worthless on the job market as I can rarely compete with specialists of any specific area. But this article gives me a little hope for the future.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

There are lots of IT people out there. They are by and large worthless, but that does not mean they don't exist. I blame hippies for ruining the math and science in the US. Group think is more important that developing individual skill sets. I think America's best days are behind her. If you are under 40, go elsewhere in the world and start over.

[mota bhai 2,675]

This is a reply to gand.

I find that phone interviews go best when the organization I'm talking to is culturally similar to the one I'm at. For example, we're a heavily outsourced and heavily matrixed shop. I spoke to a large (huge, actually) foreign bank with a small US footprint and thought the financial services aspect would count in my favor seeing how most banks/insurers are similarly set up . WRONG! Their US footprint was small and startup-like. There was just no match at all. Another place was a real estate company where their same people did deskside and infrastructure and development. I was like WHUT?

Edited December 10, 2013 by mota bhai

[GandD 5,966]

Wow, the systems guys were doubling as developers? One of those areas had to really suck.

[mota bhai 2,675]

Wow, the systems guys were doubling as developers? One of those areas had to really suck.

Basically, if it couldn't be written in Perl it wasn't written at all.

[GandD 5,966]

Perl huh? Our guys use VB and java mostly. A few apple environments as well. We actually started using system called Ignition that we use to pull information out of PLCs. Pretty much uses VB or java basics from what I hear. I'm just a dummy Systems guy. Only programming I ever do is the old school batch scripting.

[mota bhai 2,675]

Our guys use VB and java mostly. A few apple environments as well. We actually started using system called Ignition that we use to pull information out of PLCs. Pretty much uses VB or java basics from what I hear. I'm just a dummy Systems guy. Only programming I ever do is the old school batch scripting.

Learn Python. SDN is gonna blur the line between infrastructure and development. Cisco is already asking all its CCIE's and CCNP's to learn how to script in Python.

[GandD 5,966]

I feel like I've worked on one of our systems that used python but for the life of me, I can't recall. Realistically, I'd like to get my CCNP but I've been pretty lazy. The job I'm at brought me in as a coop out of college and then hired me full time. They actively check competitors locally and adjust my pay accordingly so its been pretty easy to set where I'm at. At a point now that it would be very unlikely to make more money locally, certification or no. So, its caused me to be a little slow pursuing certifications.