Recruitment firms have predicted an imminent skills shortage in the ICT industry, specifically in mid-level management, as a result of reduced hires during the global financial crisis (GFC).
Hays Information Technology, regional director, Peter Noblet, said that during the downturn, employers were reluctant to hire graduates for entry-level positions, instead choosing to develop their already-existing staff.
“As a result, organisations are not only at risk of being top-heavy, but they will soon struggle to find candidates at the mid-level with around three years experience. The recruitment battle for this mid band will intensify and moving forward companies will find themselves under pressure to promote and up-skill quickly to fill and replace that lost layer of their workforce," Noblet said.
“This will create a significant challenge for employers. Those staff that progressed in title and career during the downturn will not want to cover the intermediate or mid-level positions that they have vacated. They will want their career to continue to move forward, and employers, particularly medium-sized businesses, are already starting to question how they can keep these staff challenged, motivated and progressing. If they don’t find an answer, these staff will become disenchanted and look elsewhere as the top level of the organisation becomes compacted.”
According to the chief executive officer at Peoplebank, Peter Acheson, the GFC saw IT companies halt the initiation of new projects, ceasing hiring at all levels of experience, which is now having repercussions for employers.
“The big challenge for employers which we’re starting to see already happening in the market is we’re going to be back in a skills shortage by the end of this calendar year, we’re already starting to see some of the emerging characteristics of the skills shortage, which are increases in salaries, competition for staff – competitors actually going after their competitors staff so there will be some real challenges for employers,” Acheson said.
Greythorn managing director, Richard Fischer, said the rate of recruitment dropped across all levels of experience throughout the GFC, but did note that IT companies were focused on productivity and lowering costs.
“If they could get a lesser experienced person and train them up as opposed to having a mid-level or senior person doing the job then they would opt for that option," Fischer said.
“We would say that there was a strong favour to lower cost workers through the GFC but the end result is the same because of the decrease in hiring through that period there’s a lack of skills to companies at all levels including mid-level. I don’t think the gap in the mid-level staffing range is disproportionate to the skills shortage across the whole skills spectrum.
“I think what we’re seeing at the moment is more demand than supply of candidates in a number of sectors such as financial services and that there’s candidate scarcity across almost all levels in IT specifically.”