Leadership: Challenges of IT Work Force Development

Author: Don Hopkins

February 2008

The dynamics of the globally flat business environment have created some fundamental shifts in the staffing requirements of the IT market place.  Many large companies are outsourcing IT development work, including off-shoring.  As a result, such companies have eliminated apprenticeship programs that were feeder systems for higher level IT positions.  In addition, the aging workforce in U.S. and Europe will leave a major void in experienced IT resources.  According to Gartner Group, 76 million American workers will retire over the next two decades. Those vacancies will be filled by only 46 million workers, most of which will not have the required scientific, technology, engineering, or mathematical (STEM) skills necessary to fill these vacant positions.  This problem trickles down to the small and mid size-companies.

The solution to the IT work force development problem is long-term.  Currently, there is a high demand for IT resources with three to five years of experience. Sadly, these resources do not exist.  In the 2001/2002 time frame, the enrollment in IT type university programs declined nationally by 39% and locally by more than 50%. The decline was even greater among women. In order to improve the supply of qualified candidates, it is necessary to reach back to high schools (and possibly earlier) to ensure students are acquiring the appropriate STEM skills to select a career in information technology.  In today’s global resource market, China is graduating approximately eight times more engineers than America, while India is graduating approximately five times as many.  It is imperative to convince these high school students the demand for IT driven growth will outstrip the supply of qualified IT candidates in the near future. This supply pipeline, if fixed now, will require at least six to eight years to produce results.

Local universities must examine their curriculum to eliminate internal academic silos, provide more integrated programs, meet the external quest for future talent and determine how to affectively reach the digital natives that are moving into their universities.  Gartner Group suggests some of the skills in the highest demand will be business process designers, enterprise architects, seasoned business analysts, information modelers and emerging technology advocates.

These challenges must be met both nationally and regionally to claim success in IT work force development.