The skills shortage in IT

Like most of today’s businesses, your operation is likely to be heavily reliant on IT and communications services. Yet in the tight labour market, you might also be finding that access to some IT skills is becoming increasingly difficult. If so, what are the options, and to what extent can outsourcing help?

Thanks to sustained economic growth and near full employment, it’s no surprise that recruiting and retaining qualified professional staff in Australia is becoming a difficult task.

This is especially the case when it comes to specialised vocations, and the strong demand for IT skills in particular is making for a tight market.

In fact, the Skills in Demand List released by the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations confirms what many employers are experiencing.

In the IT sector, skills that the department declares to be in state-wide shortage across New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland include everything from general application development and software engineering, to network security, CRM/ERM and database management.

Significantly, the latest labour market profile on the industry shows that in one-year vacancies rose by 25 percent.

So what does this mean for your business? Well for one thing, this demand is driving up IT salaries, adding to the cost of recruiting and retaining IT staff.

There are a number of options SMEs can look at to tackle this problem. One option is to take advantage of skilled migration. While employers are able to sponsor overseas workers on temporary or permanent visas, by far the most common case is ‘independent migration’, where skilled IT workers move to Australia off their own bat and are then employed. If you’re considering this in the IT sector, be aware that there are specific minimum salary requirements for certain positions and skills. Helpfully, however, most of the paperwork hassles for employers have now been removed via options for electronic lodgement.

Another possible strategy in the face of the skills shortage is to offer training and education opportunities to current staff. While some skills are highly specialised and do require high levels of aptitude and experience to get right, the good news is that many basic IT skills can be learnt by existing members of your IT team, deepening the overall wealth of knowledge in your business. The drawback here, though, is that the process can’t be hurried (no one can be made an expert overnight) and by skilling up your existing staff to take on additional workload, you run the risk of overstretching an already busy and under resourced team.