* Wireless skills in high demand
IDC is reporting that a huge networking skills gap is proving troublesome to enterprises – but presents a huge opportunity for IT professionals.
Six hundred thousand IT workers were needed to install, configure, manage and secure networks in North America in 2007, 14% of the total IT workforce. Yet another 180,000 IT pros with networking skills will have to be added by 2011 to keep up with several changes that are transforming the role of the network, IDC reports in research sponsored by the Cisco Learning Institute.
The network is becoming more critical to allowing innovation and enabling business to be conducted across great distances. Increased focus on security, regulatory requirements, and the growing complexity of networks with converged voice, data and video traffic are factors driving up demand for networking professionals, IDC says.
The opportunity for IT pros lies in IDC’s estimate that 8% of the total demand for networking professionals cannot be met by the current supply.
“The projected supply of skilled networking workers is not expected to keep pace with demand, resulting in an 8% gap, or 60,000 full-time skilled workers each year over the next three years,” Cisco notes in an accompanying press release.
Wireless networking skills are going to be in high demand, IDC says.
“Wireless networking skills will have the highest growth and the greatest skill gap percentage of all the specialties we examined,” IDC reports. “By 2011, there will be a demand for nearly 45,000 IT professionals with wireless networking skills, nearly 132% growth from 2007. At the same time, only about 28,000 such professionals will be available in North America. This leaves a gap of nearly 38% of demand.”
Services vendors will try to meet this demand by expanding their offerings. But IT pros with the proper skills will see their salaries rise, IDC says. In response, IT workers are likely to pursue training in wireless networking technologies.
It turns out that there isn’t much excess demand for network security skills today – but that could change. The gap between supply and demand was 2% in 2007. “Because security has been a magnet for skilled workers for the past five to seven years, workers have moved to network security from other areas,” IDC notes.
But growth in demand is going to outstrip the growth in supply, IDC predicts. By 2011, the security skill gap will be 11% or 12%.
Another major skill gap looms in VoIP. The current gap between supply and demand of 9% will grow to 19% or 20% by 2011, IDC predicts.
These skill gaps could increase the importance of certifications. “[One] strategy leveraged by enterprises facing a skills shortage is to ‘short-circuit’ the need for years of experience and instead require a certification in a relevant technology,” IDC notes.
But this will come mostly through training of existing staff. More than 70% of enterprises plan to retrain current employees to access new skills, while 10% will do so by hiring new employees. Another 13% will use external service providers.
While IT workers can take advantage of skills gaps by getting training in specific areas, the shortages of talent may also require workers to become fluent in a broader range of networking tasks. “One strategy that companies use to mitigate the impact of the networking skill gap is to share job roles and tasks between multiple workers,” IDC says. Network pros spend about 30% of their time on their primary networking roles, 40% on other networking activities, and the rest of the time on still more IT and non-IT activities.
“Skilled network professionals,” IDC says, “perform several network jobs – network design, installation, configuration, and so on – in addition to performing work in other areas of IT and even non-IT-related work for their companies.”
IDC’s report is based on 500 telephone interviews with network managers and data from sources such as the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. About 73% of respondents expected to need more security skills in the future, while 57% expect they will require more IP telephony skills, 59% plan to add wireless networking skills, and 49% expect the importance of messaging and videoconferencing to grow.
