The ICT labour market: Where agendas collide
By Mark Wheeler, Technology & Business Magazine
18 October 2005 04:50 PM
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.
Demand for certain niche skills is particularly evident in Sydney, and most other capitals also demonstrate similar patterns. Demand for programmers and software developers in categories including .NET, Lotus Notes, SAP, Peoplesoft, Siebel, and Linux is noted in the DEWR survey. James Turner, industry analyst for Frost and Sullivan, says that the really good programmers in some of these disciplines have been able to name their price.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/business/soa/The_ICT_labour_market_Where_agendas_collide/0,39023749,39217595,00.htm