Education & Work Is there an IT skills shortage?

Whoever their manager is, needs to be replaced....

 

I've been in a similar situation, and was one of the main reasons I got out of IT.
I had an education - no one else seemed to. I ended up running the entire IT department because the manager (or anyone else) couldn't. Yet, they wouldn't up my salary.
They ended up firing the manager (heavily falsified resume), and put me in charge - still didn't up my salary..
So, I ended up handing in my resignation, and remember telling them the entire company wouldn't last 6 months without me..
Well, I was wrong. It lasted 7 months lol.
$25mil/yr turnover to closing doors in 7 months.

Plenty of uneducated people in IT who have NFI what they're doing, but paid big salaries. I was properly educated, knew the company IT system like the back of my hand, and got paid SFA. I think I was too accomdating.

 

My personal view is that there is a supply shortage of skilled people in IT but this is global, not limited only to Australia. Demand heavily outweighs supply. This imbalance has been met with an influx of fraudsters into the industry, attracted to the salary, being able to fool a non-technical interviewer and then relying on the generosity of coworkers to be mentored into becoming semi-capable in some narrow slither of the overall business.

Adding to this issue is that during the recruitment process, non-IT people (the 'normals', as we like to call them, and many of whom also work in IT) place too much emphasis on word matching on a resume.

Sure, there are certain technologies and so on, however I see over and over again companies flying in someone from OS who listed 'Oracle XYZ Product - 2 years' on his resume, rather than find a more generally skilled smart person locally (who would figure it out in 1-3 months) and allow them some time to become familiarised and skill up in this technology. An industry secret is that any IT gun could attain a workable level of knowledge in any system or language in 3-6 months - your mind works that way or it doesn't.

I believe what you need is a general all round smart person who gets stuff done, and this is how AWS, Google and the like hire. They are starting to figure it out though, I have noticed interviews are becoming a far more grilling experience in general.

A smart graduate is the best bang for buck you can get, but companies are lazy (or have short-sighted management?) and don't want the 'hassle' of building a team. Naturally, you pair them with a senior, give them 'stretch' tasks and so on.

So in short, I agree with that 'The Conversation' article, it makes economic sense. In the startup that I run a third of my team are in their mid to late 20's, are outstanding coders and are loyal as I've taught them many skills.

 

I was working at a financial institution until recently - if I had know back in the late 90's when I was at uni that COBOL was still going to be a thing (and still pretty big!), I would have continued on with it!

Cheers,
Inertia.

 

It is happening everywhere... across financial services, utilities, you name it. They refer to it as Scaled Agile, replacing Project Managers with Scrum Masters, Program Managers with Release Train Engineers. It's almost like a cult... if you don't sing up to the ceremonies i.e. showcases/retros etc. you are out.

 

I agree with this. A friend of mine leading a programming team would always say to his programmers if you think the value you bring is knowing a language, you are wrong - anyone can code, and can code cheaper. What you are is a problem solver. Solve problems and you will always have a job.

My personal addition to the above is to solve problems, and document it so anyone can solve the same problem in future, and you will always get to move on to do more interesting things

Cheers,
Inertia.

 

I'm not sure if fraudsters as you call it are a big problem. sure there are some, but they don't last very long.
The bigger issue I think is the inability to think laterally, creatively and be willing to take risks. Of course, workers will simply say that their superiors don't want that , and they are right to a large degree. This is changing.. But slowly.