A
combination of under-qualified university graduates and aged workers with
outdated skills are exacerbating a shortage of experienced information
technology professionals in Australia, with experts warning shortages could
spread in the years to come.
Technology
companies have disputed government statistics that suggest there is no shortage
in the industry, with concerns mounting that a 36 per cent decline in
undergraduate students taking up computer science degrees since 2001 could see
the situation worsen.
“There’s
both a skills shortage and a skills glut simultaneously,” said Simon Kaplan,
director of skills and industry transformation at National ICT Australia.
“We’ve seen
a big shift from the massive, back-end enterprise systems that dominated IT in
the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s, to a much more fluid and fast-moving kind of
technology that uses different kinds of techniques and tools.
“There are
lots of people who have worked in these mammoth teams who have lost their work
and are lost, they don’t know how to re-engage in the world that’s changed.”
At the same
time, students graduating with computer science degrees found it difficult to
find jobs in their field of study due to lack of practical experience.
Research
body Graduate Careers Australia suggested those who had graduated with
bachelor’s degrees in computer science during 2013 were less likely than
average to have found full-time careers in IT. “A lot of the entry-level IT
jobs that people typically would have done 10 years ago such as help desk or
first-level support have been off-shored,” said Peter Acheson, chief executive
of recruitment firm Peoplebank.
“[Students]
will need to do some re-training or up-skilling in their first six months out
of uni so companies are able to take someone on knowing they haven’t quite got
the skills they’re looking for, but are willing to make the investment in
upskilling or additional education to get them to be at the skill level they’re
required to be.”
Mr Acheson
said weak economic growth had served to stave off an industry-wide shortage of
skills, with advertisements for permanent IT jobs down 10 per cent on May last
year. But companies seeking specialist skills, particularly in online
development, were finding it more difficult to find adequate employees. “Some
organisations have been going to people in the business and asking them to run
IT projects,” he said.
Despite
official statistics suggesting there is no skills shortage in the information
technology industry, key figures including Freelancer.com chief executive Matt
Barrie have disputed the figures as not aligning with industry experience. Mr
Kaplan argued the wrong definitions were being used to measure IT jobs and
companies, making it difficult to clearly determine whether or not a skills
shortage actually exists.
“There is no
IT set of job classifications and no IT set of company classifications in the
system, because the system is probably 30 years out of date in the way it
classifies companies and jobs,” he said. “We’re running at least 20 years
behind the economies we see as our peers in terms of being able to track this
properly.”
Serial
entrepreneur Bowei Gai who is writing a global report on start-up ecosystems,
said it was important Australia reformed its immigration policy to ensure any
skills shortages could be filled by migrants. “The reason Silicon Valley is
great is because they told a fairytale that attracted so many people to come
from all over the world; more than half of Silicon Valley are foreigners,” he
said. “The next 10-year [period] will be one of entrepreneurial mobility, and
if that’s the case, the country with the best immigration policy is going to
benefit most out of this.”
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