The answer to the IT labor shortage is training, both within the company and outside it. As much as the press talks about kids "growing up digital" these days, there's not nearly enough going on in the educational system to give people real entry-level skills for the IT workplace-and there won't be such learning soon without corporate involvement. But there are also plenty of "trained" people out there who don't match specifically with the skills required by IT organizations that could be filling those job.
As a former midlevel IT manager, I have plenty of acquaintances who fell victim to the downsizing purges earlier this decade. Some found other work in the IT field, some became contract employees, and some moved on to other professions or got out of the job market entirely.
The problem that most of them faced once they were back in the job market:They were overqualified, or too qualified in the wrong areas, for most of the positions that the alleged booming economy created in IT. Human resources departments often threw their resumes out of the pile before they even got to IT managers because they looked too expensive.
At the bottom end of the spectrum, there are plenty of people I know with technical savvy who are working multiple part-time jobs or freelance coding. They can't get jobs because HR people don't see the right acronyms in their resumes, or they don't have enough "real" experience to get in the door.
If the IT industry had a powerful trade association or union, that wouldn't be a problemfor these folks. There would be apprenticeship programs, retraining and cross-training for senior IT workers, and a way for IT organizations to get the people they need.
Of course, the main loser would be corporate profit margins. Yet it seems that, by their own inaction, corporate executives are creating an environment ripe for just such a labor organization. The vast majority of companies do little to train people to fill IT positions or reassign senior people-they treat filling IT jobs like they treat buying PCs, looking to fill a specific spec sheet for the lowest price.
There are already stirrings of a union movement out there-particularly in the Silicon Valley area. In Baltimore, there's a Data Storage and Retrieval Workers local chapter of the IWW forming. That's the Industrial Workers of the World-the Wobblies.
So pay now for training and retraining, or pay later. This labor market's only going to get tighter.
-Sean Gallagher can be reached at [email protected] Copyright (c) 1997 CMP Media Inc.
� 1997 [email protected]
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