KEY POINTS:
The present ICT employment market has variously been described as "chaotic", "under crisis" and even "an old man's industry" as employers seek experienced staff for urgent projects and shun young graduates lacking specific experience. At the same time, enrolment in tertiary ICT courses continues to fall or at best remain steady at low volumes; a source of ongoing concern for Kiwi educators and the industry.
Nor are these developments local - research firm Gartner predicts an international shortage of three million ICT workers by 2010 and 10 million by 2020 while, regionally, an IDC survey of the Asia-Pacific region excluding Japan has predicted a shortfall of 221,000 people with advanced skills in wireless technologies, security and IP telephony by 2009 - part of a total network professional shortfall of 396,000 for the area.
The dilemma for employers is that with competition increasingly global, ICT technologies and related projects are now more critical to business efficiency and success than ever - the need to hire, contract or simply source the right ICT skills is, therefore, strategically important and is why managers say finding the right staff in the right numbers is the most significant management problem they face. Without the right staff, important ICT projects are delayed or permanently jeopardised and "people poaching" is rampant.
"I hear stories of horrendous staff turnover [through poaching] and the whole industry stands accused - it seems it's easier to steal each other's people than to grow your own. Executives argue there's no point training their ICT people internally only to lose them to someone else, which is horribly short-sighted. The industry needs to grow up," says Garth Biggs, executive director for the HiGrowth Project, a trustee organisation set up to facilitate growth in the local ICT sector.
Arguably though, immaturity within the global ICT industry shouldn't be surprising. The industry is highly dynamic and young - the PC has only been commercially available for around 25 years and sophisticated networking and wireless technologies for half that time. Throw in the occasional bit of ill-timing, the dot com crash and general technology hype and its understandable traditional and emerging ICT brands have been forced to focus on establishment, finding new markets, tracking ICT trends and adapting business strategies for survival. Adequately communicating the buzz and potential of the industry to career planners has not happened and has led to some unfortunate misperceptions about what ICT work entails.
"Parents hugely influence children as to which career to follow and parents think ICT is low paid, blue-collar, high-risk work. The industry isn't organised enough to combat that [erroneous] perception and lacks an audible voice. It doesn't help that any time you see an ICT person on TV or in a movie they are portrayed as a weird geek, something the industry should battle against," says Biggs.
A further turn-off for career planners is the tendency of employers to expect ICT staff to be autonomous and productive from day one rather than choosing to mentor them slowly. This isn't reasonable, argues Biggs, particularly in a small market like New Zealand where ICT workers at all levels are more likely to be customer-facing.
A case in point may be Telecom, which wants to hire up to 400 "ready to roll" ICT staff within the next 12 months to cope with pressing projects including a new mobile network build and services aimed at meeting regulatory requirements and government demands.
Telecom shared capability general manager Tina Hammond says while there's a priority to hire in New Zealand, many people are hired internationally.
"System testers and business analysts with project management experience are really thin on the ground in New Zealand. We can't offer OE hires a different salary band but we do try to provide them with price comparisons around the cost of living and what they will earn here. We're not normally dealing with the totally uninformed," says Hammond.
She says while lifestyle initially draws experienced ICT workers to New Zealand, Telecom still has to use retention strategies to keep them here. Hammond says while Telecom will begin to widen its graduate recruitment programme over the next few years, the secondary education sector could be closer to the ICT sector, initiating student assignments that focus more on the business analysis and project management skills employers are short of as well as schemes that allow students to work with ICT companies, thereby starting their career path earlier.
Garry Roberton, programme and education manager for Wintec and chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Computing Qualifications, says educational semantics around ICT also need reviewing - the term "computing" doesn't come close to describing what ICT work entails yet secondary schools and tertiary institutions still use it.
However, Roberton says employers are also acting as their own worst enemies by looking for short-term "fixes" to ICT workforce issues rather than engaging in a little navel gazing and building industry initiatives and growing skill over time.
"ICT employers need to provide informal, even unpaid internships where students complete their qualifications while also in the workforce. This lets students evaluate the workplace and employers evaluate the student," says Roberton.
The labour market provides young people with the employment reassurance previous generations lacked and leads some students to temporarily opt out of higher education in favour of an OE and early independence. ICT industry scholarships that remove the cost of tertiary study can combat this, as can focus on diversity and addressing the gender imbalance within the ICT industry, says Roberton.
Biggs agrees, saying: "ICT workforce problems here are compounded by anecdotal evidence that we don't like employing people with non-Anglo Saxon surnames."
However, workforce diversity has long been championed by international ICT organisations including IBM and more recently brands like HP (small business manager Warwick Grey says HP New Zealand desires a more diverse workforce to reflect the diversity of its global business). And energetic organisations like Women in IT (WIT) are seriously addressing the gender imbalance in ICT by marketing the dynamic, challenging and professional side of the industry to women. Obviously though, there's still plenty to do and therein lies the solution to the ICT skills crisis - most organisations are well aware of the problem and most could be doing more than they are.
Any such effort would be far from charitable - IP networking brand Cisco recently extended its Networking Academy programme, making it available in more than 240 tertiary institutions in Australia and New Zealand. Why? Cisco skills are in extremely short supply internationally, delaying new projects, causing implementation partners to pinch each other's talent and slowing growth - undesirable for a company with an aggressive growth goal of 20 per cent per annum.
"The Networking Academy is the biggest thing we are doing to address the ICT skills crisis - there are now 1600 students enrolled in New Zealand within 35 institutes. It surprises me it's still a challenge to attract people into what is a highly attractive industry. We hope more people will see ICT as well-paid, clean work requiring universal skills and universally useful qualifications," says Cisco country manager Geoff Lawrie.
