Causes and effects of an IT skills crisis

The IT jobs market is making a strong recovery, but is becoming increasingly polarised.

Demand for high-value business-oriented staff is shooting up - more than double this time last year - but technical skills are coming under increasing competition from overseas, says this year's annual IT Skills Trends 2005 report from user group the Institute for the Management of Information Systems (Imis).

One of the main causes of the growing demand for project and programme managers is the number of large public sector technology initiatives underway, coupled with the government's realisation that a lack of relevant skills has been a big factor in its well-documented IT problems.

'The importance of non-technical IT engineering and management skills has been neglected since before Y2K and the dot com boom and bust, and is a prime factor in many of the more public computer failures of recent years,' says Philip Virgo, strategic advisor to Imis.

Problems filling vacancies 'Those who have belatedly discovered its importance and those seeking to recruit such skills on the open market are therefore facing severe problems in filling vacancies,' he says. 'This is often not the public sector itself, but the suppliers to the public sector.'

Programme management skills cannot be learned overnight, and recruiters are already having trouble filling posts. And that's before the next tranche of deals - including the £4bn Defence Information Infrastructure and the national ID cards programme - goes into implementation.

'To train people who haven't had previous experience takes at least 18 months - simply doing a course in methodology won't produce a good programme manager,' says Virgo.

Imis' recommendation is for organisations to look to their existing user base.

'Given the timescale necessary to re-orient current technically-focused university courses and graduate trainee programmes, we can expect a focus on retraining mature user staff,' says Virgo.

'If there are users with experience of major technology projects the training period can be cut because they have seen the other side of implementation.'

A skills crisis cuts both ways. Not only is the growth in public sector implementations putting pressure on the industry's skills base, but there are implications for the success of government IT projects if these gaps cannot be filled.

Jim Norton, senior egovernment policy advisor at the Institute of Directors, sees a huge problem in the future. 'I don't see public sector projects succeeding without getting the users on side, and that is not possible without people skilled in project and programme management who understand this is about people,' he says.

'It is a vicious spiral with really serious implications for the success of government sector IT programmes.'

Because of the way the Treasury defines, and therefore sets, the budgets, projects need to be changed to reflect the demand for more expensive, higher-level skills, says Norton.

'Imis is right to identify the lack of skills, but there is also a lack of budget in the public sector to pay for better project and programme management to talk about how to get users on side, re-engineer processes, do the necessary training, and so on,' he says.

'In the past the public sector has not budgeted that properly, and it still doesn't understand well enough how much money needs to be put aside to spend on the management side.'

Ian Watmore, head of the IT profession for the government, acknowledges the need for investment in Whitehall's programme management skills, but does not see a crisis looming.

Pressure on suppliers' resources is coming from recovery of the private sector IT spend, and the government has enough to offer to compete for skills, both in-house and with its suppliers, he says.

'From the point of view of getting resources into government we have to compete with the wider market, but the thing we have to offer is that the government has among the hardest projects, with the highest profile, and the best people like to play on the biggest stage,' says Watmore.

'There is also the more formal side, which is that our contracts are rigorously procured, and it is therefore commercially risky for a company to neglect our deals.'

A skills shortage need not necessarily become a crisis.

UK has sufficient talent The pressure of a recovering recruitment market is also an opportunity, says Terry Watts, chief operating officer of sector skills council e-Skills UK.

'The danger is that any problems in the public sector will be very visible, which does the industry no good at all,' he says. 'But it also means people will start to invest systematically in these types of skills.'

John Eary, head of skills source consultancy at NCC Group, is confident the UK has sufficient talent to draw on to avoid serious problems in the long term.

'There are some innate abilities needed to become a good programme manager, and the question is whether the UK has enough of these people to start with,' he says.

'If the UK fulfils the vision of a knowledge economy then there should be a good pool of people to draw on - they may not call themselves programme managers at the moment, but they still have those skills.'