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IT Pros Blast ITAA Skills Shortage Report
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June 03, 2002 (Computerworld) -- With 35 years of IT experience and expertise in C++, Java and other technical skills in high demand, Warren MacQueen thinks he should have no problem landing a job.
But the Kansas City-area IT veteran said that after falling victim to mass layoffs at Sprint Corp. in November, he sent out 100 resumes and heard back from only a handful of companies. "I don't think that my skill set is inadequate," he said.
MacQueen is one of scores of IT workers who were angered by last month's Information Technology Association of America report, which claimed there's a shortage of U.S. workers with the right IT skills (see story).
The study projected that despite a 5% dip in the IT job market last year, upward of 1.1 million jobs will be created this year. However, it continued, less than half of those will be filled because workers don't have the right skills. Critics claim that there aren't any jobs in sight and that the supposed IT skills shortage is a myth perpetuated by big business and lobbyists trying to preserve the current employers' market.
"[The study] doesn't seem to jibe with the facts, so you question if there's a hidden agenda or just a lack of judgment," said Ray Hooker, a networking consulting engineer at Cisco Systems Inc.
However, ITAA spokesman Bob Cohen said the report is a forecast rather than an indicator of current conditions. A telephone-based survey of 532 managers across a variety of industries found that companies are struggling to find workers with technical expertise, domain knowledge and project experience, he said.
"People's frustration is understandable, because times have changed and it's more difficult to drive your career than it was in 1999 and 2000," said Cohen. "But you can't overlook what the requirements are or what the hiring companies' views are."
One factor fueling the uproar over the study is that the Arlington, Va.-based ITAA is one of the nation's biggest supporters of the H-1B temporary foreign visa program.
Some critics charged that the skills shortage study was just an attempt to persuade Congress to raise the H-1B cap and flood the IT job market with lower-paid foreigners in order to drive down salaries.
Hooker said he's not opposed to the H-1B program and added that many foreign workers are better educated and more up to date on IT skills than their U.S. counterparts. But, he said, American workers with significant job experience who are equally or more qualified are being shut out by an oversaturated job market.
"We wouldn't want to allow undercutting of existing [U.S.] workers," said Hooker. "I respect [foreign workers'] skills, but a 25-year-old with two years' experience is still a 25-year-old with two years' experience."
Tom Scott, president of the San Diego Oracle Users Group, is one of many skeptics of the skills shortage who said he often sees phony job listings likely geared toward hiding the job shortage. Scott and others say they can tell the ads are phony because the job listings typically ask for an impossible combination of skills and certifications. "They want every acronym under the sun for $30 [an hour]," Scott said.
Another issue is an age-old problem: human resources professionals who lack IT skills but are responsible for filling highly technical posts.
But that argument is always used when the market is down, countered the ITAA's Cohen.
"In good times, [recruiters are] brilliant, and in bad times, they don't know what they're doing," he said.
Different Perspectives
Indeed, the ITAA's contention that companies are having trouble filling jobs does have some backing. Hiring managers are split on the job-shortage/skills-shortage debate, with some supporting the findings that were detailed in the ITAA's report.
At Delaware Investments in Philadelphia, IT jobs are scarce—as are jobs across the company—because they're being filled only if they're deemed critical, said company spokesman Tom Gariepy.
IT job openings at Lockheed Martin Corp. are also down, though not as drastically as at other companies, said Don Peterman, director of employment for the company's Delaware Valley Regional Recruiting Center.
Last year, Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed filled about 700 IT jobs, and it expects to fill about half that number this year, said Peterman. Since the middle of last year, every job opening at the company has generated a flood of resumes, with more than enough qualified candidates, he added.
Still, finding qualified IT candidates to fill open positions is a big challenge, said Nicole Tucker, a recruiter at Philadelphia-based Peco Energy Co., a subsidiary of Chicago-based Exelon Corp.
"It's really tough for us to find very specialized people," she said, adding that applicants for the eight to 10 high-level IT jobs that open each year lack either degrees or business knowledge and project management expertise. The company often decides to hire its contractors for full-time jobs because they have developed the right skill sets while at Peco, Tucker added.
Kathy Walters, vice president of IT at Exelon's energy division in Philadelphia, said her unit is fully staffed now. But when positions do open up in the division, Walters said, she gets many resumes but few from qualified candidates.
"Finding the right match for what you have to spend is tough," Walters said.
Factors Driving IT Job Shortage
Corporate consolidation resulting in job cuts
Former dot-com employees flooding the corporate IT market
Slashed IT budgets that fund only mission-critical projects
Employers cutting experienced, high-paid workers, and replacing them with younger, lower-paid workers
IT departments pushing employees to work longer and harder
Companies hiring temporary contractors and pushing work overseas
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