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IT Leaders Will Struggle To Meet Future Demands, Study Says (betanews.com) 113

Posted by msmash from the caution dept.
When it comes to meeting future demands, IT leaders in the UK are lagging behind those in Germany and the US. From a report: This is according to a new report by Brocade, entitled Global Digital Transformation Skills Study. The report is based on a survey of 630 IT leaders in the US, UK, France, Germany, Australia and Singapore. It says that organizations are "at a tipping point" -- a point in time when technology demands are just about to outstrip the skills supply. Consequently, those that train their staff now and prepare for the future in that respect are the ones that are setting themselves up for a successful future. Almost three quarters (74 percent) of IT leaders in the UK see IT departments as either "very important" or "critical" to both innovation and the growth of their business. But the same woes reman, as almost two thirds (63 percent) think they'll struggle to find the right people in the next year.
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IT Leaders Will Struggle To Meet Future Demands, Study Says More

IT Leaders Will Struggle To Meet Future Demands, Study Says

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  • fucking glorious (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    i'm gonna get paid!!!!!!

  • You're outsourcing the jobs! Then you complain! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28, 2017 @03:49PM (#54321841)

    You outsource the jobs, then complain you can't find qualified workers? Bullshit.

    You're not paying them enough.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I've noticed in the UK that a lot of jobs are just six month contacts. No stability, no benefits and pay barely above salary level. I guess maybe they were getting EU people to fill those roles, at least before Brexit started.

      That said there is a genuine shortage of skills in my field. Diving natives away from the UK certainly won't help.

      • There's indeed a possibility that a lot of Europeans were filling those jobs and went away because of Brexit. Friends of mine relocated away from the UK weeks after the Brexit vote, as they were made to feel very unwelcome all of a sudden (Spanish husband, Polish wife, in the UK for 10 years). The short-term, no-benefits jobs may also be because quite a few of the banks and financial places are now executing their contingency planning. My local financial regulator has been swamped since July 2016, even tho

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

          "cost of living increase"

          The govt have neglected housing for 3 decades, it's a roundabout cause of brexit - cost of living is too much because of stagnant wages, soaring houses prices and rents, both affected by immigration. Funny thing is the middle classes flat out refuse to accept that more people going after jobs = lower wage or that more people trying to rent or buy = higher housing costs, it's a very weird denial of the most fundamental aspect of capitalism which is 'supply and demand'. But hey, easie

          • "cost of living increase"

            The govt have neglected housing for 3 decades, it's a roundabout cause of brexit - cost of living is too much because of stagnant wages, soaring houses prices and rents, both affected by immigration. Funny thing is the middle classes flat out refuse to accept that more people going after jobs = lower wage or that more people trying to rent or buy = higher housing costs, it's a very weird denial of the most fundamental aspect of capitalism which is 'supply and demand'. But hey, easier to just chant 'racism'.

            Not denying that it is a factor, but I don't really expect the wages to go up or the cost of housing to go down post-Brexit... or at least not in any significant way. I do expect a drop in high-paying jobs in financial services companies, banking and fintech, which will reduce the amount of money circulating in the local economy. Being just back from a short business trip in Blighty, I don't think the shop keepers need another reduction in business. Talking of supply and demand, Blighty doesn't produce half

      • Diving natives away from the UK certainly won't help.

        They're vital for the pearl and sponge industries.

    • The used a term that is foreign to me. "Companies that train"? Companies don't train people in the USA. Companies use up people and burn them out, then replace them with foreign labor.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      It is actually a lot more long-term. As IT people have been treated badly pay- and career-wise (and in other ways) for a while now, many people that would have been good at it decided to enroll in other subjects at university or learn another trade-skill. The skill-gap is real, but those that complain now are the morons that caused it by focusing on short-term goals instead of on long-term survival.

  • The right people (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cmdr_klarg ( 629569 ) on Friday April 28, 2017 @03:49PM (#54321843)

    two thirds (63 percent) think they'll struggle to find the right people in the next year.

    Translation: Idiots who will work tons of extra hours for peanuts.

  • And I predict the solution will be... (Score:3)

    by jez9999 ( 618189 ) on Friday April 28, 2017 @03:50PM (#54321847) Homepage Journal

    Import India. Don't train up the natives in the UK, why would you do that? California is so great now that it's Indian, so let's do it in the UK too!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ghoul ( 157158 )

      OK Californians get to complain about Indians coming to California but Mexicans dont get to complain about Anglos coming to California?
      And UK? Cmon British came to India as traders and stayed for 400 years. The English have noone to blame but themselves. if they hadnt come to India, Indians wouldnt be speaking English and taking IT jobs

  • Visa? (Score:2)

    by hackel ( 10452 )

    So does that mean I'll finally be able to get a bloody work visa soon? Not that I'm sure I'd even want one after Brexit... I certainly wouldn't blame IT people for abandoning that sinking ship!

  • Half way there (Score:5, Informative)

    by xfizik ( 3491039 ) on Friday April 28, 2017 @04:02PM (#54321945)
    They have the word "demand" in the article so they are half way there - now let them figure out the "supply" part of the equation. Pay more and there will be no problem with the supply of skilled people [skilled as in properly trained, motivated, primarily local workforce, not as in "outsourced to India"].
    • Salaries seem to have been stagnant for the last 10 years..... they need to put their money where there mouth is.

    • Re:Half way there (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mikael ( 484 ) on Friday April 28, 2017 @05:21PM (#54322387)

      They can't - there's a housing shortage. Giving one group of workers prices the others out of being able to afford a home. Housing quality in many areas is rather grim. There''s not enough space in front of each house for more than one car, roads aren't wide enough for cars to park on either side and have more than a single truck or ambulance get through. Driveways are "shared" between homes so that different garages actually open onto the same driveway. Some homes are only sold as leaseholds (you own the house but lease the land for 99 years, and pay rent each year) rather than freeholds (own both house and land).

      In the USA or Canada, the federal government owns all non-developed land, and so they can sell it off as and when needed. In the UK, all the undeveloped land is either owned by private estates or farmers. We have to take land used for food production out of operation in order to build more homes. UK already imports 45% of food. Married couples are being forced to house share with a room each because of the shortage in the South East. There's now the problem of beds-in-sheds-to-rent in back gardens and communal rooms in London.

      https://www.vice.com/en_uk/art... [vice.com]

      http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fin... [telegraph.co.uk]

      • They can't - there's a housing shortage.

        I'll call BS to the general idea. Sure there may be a housing shortage in Silicon Valley, but there are a LOT of other areas where there are plenty of houses for reasonable rates with decent sized yards ... and in reasonable sized cities.

        Give up the idea that you have to live in SV, SF, NY, or any number of other expensive west/east coast cities and you'll find there are plenty of nice houses for the "geeks". Also tell your company to let you work remotely or set up a remote office in a cheaper place.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        This. I see loads of jobs in London, Oxford, Reading and other big cities that pay about the same as I get now, but housing costs are 3-4x as much.

        Either we need a massive housing crash, prices down at least 50%, or we need £100k entry level developer salaries.

        Until recently they were able to find EU migrants willing to put up with living in a shed, but with Brexit that supply is drying up.

        • This. I see loads of jobs in London, Oxford, Reading and other big cities that pay about the same as I get now, but housing costs are 3-4x as much.

          This. The rent for a small flat close to our London office costs 7 times the monthly payment on my current property. Staying in a hotel 500 meters from the office and eating lunch/dinner in restaurants is cheaper than renting a flat in the 5 kilometers zone around the office. That's more or less what I did the last time my then-employer reassigned me for 3 months in Guildford, 15 years ago. The real estate market in the UK is seriously screwed and has been for some time.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The U.S. Government does NOT own all of the non-developed land. It owns a great deal of it in some states - e.g., Alaska, where it was U.S. taxpayers who PAID to buy the entire state from Russia. But there are lots of places where there is land that is privately owned but just not developed yet. Eventually there are pressures to develop it, and then you see the trees cut down, or the sand dunes razed, etc., with the new developments often named after the thing that was destroyed to make room for them.

  • >poo in loo
    >can't figure out why workers are consistently underqualified

  • Is there anywhere on Earth (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday April 28, 2017 @04:05PM (#54321971)
    Where demand for skills doesn't outstrip supply? Also, why do I make such crap wages with so little training opportunities that aren't paid for out of my pocket if supply is such an issue. It's almost as if somebody with a vested interest in having a bigger labor pool is pushing some kind of narrative. But they wouldn't do that, would they?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Walter Lippmann sure pushed the narrative that the "bewildered herd" (consumers) should be governed by a "specialized class" (capitalists). And this has largely achieved by driving up consumption of the bewildered herd (debt) and by the specialized class putting the global labor markets in competition with each other.

      Smash your television.

    • Where demand for skills doesn't outstrip supply?

      An unsustainable situation. One or more of the following will occur:
      * Consumers will learn to live without it.
      * Sellers will increase because people will be attracted into doing it.
      * The price will shift until demand and supply balance.

    • The reason companies don't want to pay for training is that that after a few layoffs employees have no reason to stay with a company if they can find a better job that uses their new skills.

  • Knew this since the dot com bust... (Score:3)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Friday April 28, 2017 @04:05PM (#54321973)
    I read a study after the dot com bust that the IT industry will have a shortage of skilled workers as baby boomers retire and foreign workers go home by 2030. That's when I decided to go back to school to learn computer programming and got into IT support. I'm looking forward to making money in the next 30 years.

  • It's hard to find people willing to work for 60+ hours a week for 60K in the bay area.

  • Skills needed (Score:5, Informative)

    by Archfeld ( 6757 ) <treboreel@live.com> on Friday April 28, 2017 @04:11PM (#54322009) Journal

    4 year college degree, and 5 years experience in a technology that has only existed for 14 months and cannot be taught in a classroom outside of business anyways. The requirements are way past ridiculous and border on the insane. To top it all off the person doing the hiring hasn't a clue about the actual technical requirements needed to perform the job. They want their cake and want it for free, they want to tell you what to do, how to do it and pay you next to nothing all the while not having a clue what they REALLY want, how to do it, or the resources needed to do it with. Just another day in the life of an IT professional...

    • Re:Skills needed (Score:4, Informative)

      by computational super ( 740265 ) on Friday April 28, 2017 @04:16PM (#54322033)
      And they want you to do it in a wide-open bullpen office with no walls, listening to your coworkers shout on the phone, burp and talk about their dogs right next to you.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Archfeld ( 6757 )

        LOL you sound like you work at the same place I do. Most currently the excuse for the open office layout I work in is security. The idea is no one will do anything risky if someone is always looking at you. Luckily the environment needed for the equipment is not conducive to human habitation so I spend most of my time in a microfiber pullover under the tiles in the lab rather than at my desk, only the parts ordering and weekly reporting draws me to my workstation.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by antdude ( 79039 )

        And most of them won't offer remote options and require people to work onsite fulltime!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      5 years experience in a technology that has only existed for 14 months and cannot be taught in a classroom outside of business anyways. The requirements are way past ridiculous and border on the insane.

      There's a "shortage" of good liars. I know a guy who was a fantastic BS-er that way. He had a network of fake references, for example. "Sure, he was doing Java for us in 1989. We used the first beta out. And he used Silverlight when it was still Bronzelight."

      I felt too slimy to copy his techniques, but in a c

      • There is also another side to your coin. How often do corporations lie? Answer: When their lips move, they lie.. Give them what they worked so hard to deserve!! Act like a typical politician during interviews.

    • 4 year college degree, and 5 years experience in a technology that has only existed for 14 months and cannot be taught in a classroom outside of business anyways.

      And be under 20 years old, left handed and a Sagittarius with garde 3 piano and a brown belt in judo.

      I saw an ad like that once - maybe it was a typo but you'd have had to be admitted to college two years early and finished in half the time AND been working overtime while doing it.

  • For me I suppose it's okay because I'm old school and have proven I can continually expand my skill sets. For whatever reason, many people in IT seem to stop learning after their certification/university degree courses. Not all of course, but many I've encountered. Perhaps this is in part because of false starts. The people who started (and in many, many cases ended) their careers with MS Visual Basic and database template gui's like crystal reports. In my opinion, any IT person who doesn't know how to get
    • There are different people who think different ways. Some people struggle to learn one thing. Does that mean they should be out of a job? I learn things on the fly like you, but I'm not prepared to punish someone for not being able to adapt.

    • AI, Robotics, and OO Programming (Java is there but may be on decline in a few years in favor of Python or improved JavaScript and possibly C/C++).

      Python is getting stronger in data mining and the cloud (AWS lambda), but that's because it has nice bindings for a lot of c/c++ libraries. Typescript is nice, but it doesn't have a mature ecosystem (like a mature IDE).
      C++ is still overly complicated which prevents good autocomplete and needs expensive tools to sanity check.

      General purpose computing will be the d

  • Pay and treat people very well in the profession now, and in 5 years or so you will see more people coming into the profession. That's usually the sane way to do it.

  • What's the most time efficient pathway into work for someone not interested in programming? Something that actually works even if it's a crap job.

    A testing qualification of some sort?
    Cisco style sysadmin style small modules that will get you *something*.
    Or just a MCSE?

    ^ and combine all this with the usual self study.

    • When I got started after the dot com bust, I got my A+, Network+ and Microsoft Windows 2000 certification. That set me up for IT Support contracts that start at $10 per hour (minimum wage) in Silicon Valley.

  • Low wages. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The pay scales for software engineers (and probably IT people too) are about half what they are in the USA.

    And there's a shortage? Oh my! I wonder why?

    • The same reason why we the US has a shortage of skilled trade workers: we told kids that college was the path to a great paying career. Skilled trade workers are retiring, foreign skilled trade workers are going home and no one are replacing them. After the dot com crash, kids saw no future in computers and went into healthcare. As skilled IT workers retire and foreign IT workers go home, no one is going to replace them.

  • So Technology and engineering in the UK is in danger of being substandard compared to Germany?

    Say it ain't so!
    Next thing you know Mercedes will be more reliable than Jaguar!

  • I'm in the UK, semi-retired but still do some freelance, some (free and paid) support for voluntary organisations. I've been 'industry' for 40 years this year.

    The first thing I see is a mad/incompetent buzzword list based recruitment process from agencies that don't understand anything about technology. I'm asked to do stuff, then eliminated because one easy-to-learn (I mean a couple of days, usually) thing is missing from the application. I don't lie either, I don't like it and don't need to. This leads to the next thing.

    When I entered the industry, managers and companies expected to train and develop (permanent) staff, as part of the social contract. They understood that people don't know everything but half-way smart/motivated people can learn stuff too. Now this is treated as an economic externality in that they expect the (very expensive) universities and colleges to do everything for them. They appear to complain bitterly on television when they find that they may have to use some of their own resources.

    Finally, on the same lines, they need to try and let non graduates and other fields in. There weren't any computer science degrees when I started, I studied chemistry and a lot of my co-workers studied Greek and Latin, for example. Ability to learn is (often) a horizontal thing, though I agree people have blind spots.

    So this can probably be sorted out, but it requires a change of attitude in the career chain.

  • Ramen, like noodles? Roman, like Julius Caesar?

    Perhaps they're talking about unabandoning a ship?

  • From TFA (Score:3)

    by Hognoxious ( 631665 ) on Saturday April 29, 2017 @11:42AM (#54325353) Homepage Journal

    New and needed skills are lacking, while those that are outdated are prevailing.

    The level of insight to come up with this isn't something you can learn. You're born with it. It's a gift.

    After the break: firstborn children are generally older than their siblings, claims report.

  • Anyone else wondering what this "brocade" outfit's trying to sell?

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