Aging Workers, Automation Portend IT Hiring Problems

Computerworld - Data centers are being squeezed by two seemingly contradictory trends that are slowly draining IT operations of senior employees and making it harder to hire replacements: an aging workforce and increasing automation.

That was the finding of a survey of 179 IT managers conducted earlier this year by AFCOM, an association of data center managers. The results were released last week.

Nearly half of the survey respondents said it takes at least three months to fill senior-level technical and management positions, while 38% reported that their data centers employ fewer workers than they did five years ago.

To address the implications of such trends, data center executives need to train and promote workers to senior positions so that "when you go to hire, you are not trying to hire the highest-level positions," said Leonard Eckhaus, founder of Orange, Calif.-based AFCOM.

The association estimates that the pool of available senior-level data center workers will decline by 45% by 2015. "It's already more difficult than ever to fill open positions in the data center," Eckhaus said.

Retirement Trend

Meanwhile, Eckhaus said, as automation cuts data center staffs, people are hesitant to enter the IT field.

And at the same time the workforce is shrinking, more and more IT workers are approaching retirement age. Nate Viall, a Des Moines-based recruiter who specializes in finding application developers for the IBM iSeries, said 20% of the candidates in his database have 25 years or more of IT experience—more than triple the percentage in 1999.

"IT people are not working very far into their 60s," said Viall. "If they have reasonable financial stability, they are bailing out."

At the same time, IT manager Jamie Man, who heads the Indiana chapter of AFCOM, said his health care company, which he asked not to be identified, has found that younger workers aren't interested in working with older systems. "If they don't see a GUI interface, they just don't want to deal with it," said Man.