* IT workforce report indicates a shift in IT staffing ahead
Back in September when the Society for Information Management (SIM) held its annual conference in Dallas, there was a lot of fanfare over comments made by keynote speaker Robert Reich, the former U.S. Secretary of Labor. Reich seemed to be pretty bullish on the IT profession, predicting that more than 21 million IT jobs will be created in the United States in the next six years. He was citing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
I’m betting the audience of SIM members was ecstatic over this news. Who wouldn’t want to see the IT profession grow at such a blistering pace? We’re talking about adding three and a half million new jobs a year between now and 2012. Wow!
What troubles me is that Reich’s data is incongruous with information provided by IT executives representing a broad spectrum of industries. Could it be that Reich’s prediction is too good to be true?
The SIM Advocacy program sponsored a 2005 study in which senior IT executives were queried about their current and future skill requirements. The executives were asked to project their needs through 2008. While the results show a general trend for an increase in the aggregate workforce (i.e., including in-house staff, contractors and third party service providers), there doesn’t seem to be a huge spike in demand – certainly not 3.5 million new people a year.
Actually, the report entitled “The Information Technology Workforce: Trends and Implications 2005-2008” doesn’t so much address the number of IT jobs, but rather the kinds of IT jobs that will be in demand in the near term.
The report concludes that there will be a shift in IT staffing over the next few years. Companies are starting to focus on keeping critical customer-facing skills in-house while relying more heavily on contractors and third-party providers to provide purely technical skills.
What are the critical skills that companies want to keep in-house? In 2005, organizations of virtually all sizes (i.e., small companies up to large enterprises) identified specific skills in three areas:
* Project management skills: project planning, budgeting, and scheduling; project leadership; and project risk management
* Business domain skills: functional/process knowledge; company knowledge; business process design/re-engineering; industry knowledge; and change management
* Technical skills: systems analysis; and systems design
Notice that business and management skills are of increasing importance, while technical skills are less important to keep in-house.
By 2008, there is a more pronounced shift away from purely technical skills and toward managing relationships with users and service providers. The report says that companies will want to keep these skills in-house:
* Project management skills: user relationship management
* Business domain skills: functional/process knowledge; business process design/re-engineering; industry knowledge; company knowledge; change management; managing stakeholder expectations; and communication
* Technical skills: IT architecture/standards; and security
* Sourcing skills: sourcing strategy
* IT Administration skills: IT governance
On the flip side, the IT executives indicated that many purely technical skills could be sourced from contractors or third-party providers, either in the U.S. or abroad. Among those skills are:
* Programming
* System testing
* Support/help desk
* Systems design
* Systems analysis
* Voice/data telecommunications
* Database design/management
* Business continuity/disaster recovery
* Operations
* Server hosting
The report comes to the following conclusion: “Taken as a whole, these results signal a shift in the mission of the Information Systems function from delivering technology-based solutions to managing the process of delivering solutions, a subtle but telling distinction. As part of that process, organizations are increasingly looking to third-party providers and independent contractors for technical skills, taking advantage of the maturation of the market for IT services and enabling flexible staffing schemes.”
Robert Reich might have grabbed headlines with his 21 million new IT jobs, but I think the more important story is the one above. It means that a lot of IT people will need to acquire business skills in a hurry, or be prepared to wear a service provider’s badge in the coming years.
