Feast or famine? The IT job outlook

Dear Bob …

I’ve read more than once that CIOs are having trouble hiring qualified talent. I’ve also read more than once that it’s hard for out-of-work IT professionals to find jobs.

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How can both of these situations be happening at once? Or is someone just spinning things?

– Wondering

Dear Wondering …

The answer isn’t all that complicated, and it provides guidance for everyone in IT who wants their career to last.

CIOs are having trouble finding qualified talent — that is, people with the specific skills they need to take care of business. This is truer on the applications side of the house than the operations side, by the way (I think — I’m basing this on conversations I’ve had, not any formal studies or statistics).

For CIOs, it’s a double-headed monster: not enough applicants with experience in the not-all-that-new-anymore technologies and methodologies used to build modern applications (Java, .Net, SOA, Agile/Scrum and so on); also not enough go-getters willing to work on legacy technologies like Cobol and CICS.

I say “go-getters” because I doubt there’s a shortage of potential employees who know Cobol and its associated technologies, but on average (yes, it’s a generality), the folks who want these jobs are more likely to be coasting than charging hard. They might possess the right skills, but having the desired attitude is a different matter. The go-getters want positions that gain them experience in the new technologies and methodologies.

From the perspective of out-of-work IT professionals, it’s mirror world. The fact of the matter is that the U.S. IT unemployment rate is relatively low, at 6 percent or thereabouts according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The jobs are there — sort of.

What I think is going on is the confluence of a number of trends:

• More sophistication in hiring: IT managers have started to catch on about the importance of hiring great employees. Many are willing to keep positions open longer so as to avoid hiring a mediocre employee.
• Shift in responsibility for career management: Once upon a time, employers took responsibility for employee careers, providing development opportunities, including training in new technologies, because it was part of the implied social contract with their employees. That’s largely gone. Employees either take responsibility for keeping their skills current or they become obsolete.
• Diminished market value of experience: Back in the day, an experienced developer — say, a Cobol programmer — could succeed in a position that required a different language (PL/1, perhaps) with very little adjustment time. That was when languages weren’t tied to entirely new methodologies. With the advent of object technologies that changed. To succeed at OO, developers needed to understand entirely different analysis and design methodologies and philosophies; SOA has had a similar impact. As a result, generic experience is worth much less than it used to be in the IT marketplace.
• Global competition: It’s hardly a secret that every IT professional is now competing in the global labor marketplace, which applies downward pressure on wages and increases competition for open positions.

I’m not going to make friends saying this: The jobs are there. Unemployed developers are unemployed for a reason. They haven’t kept their skills current; they haven’t learned to sell themselves well in job interviews; and in some cases they’re simply on the wrong side of the bell curve — people who have chosen the wrong field and wouldn’t make good hires.

Somewhere there’s an MBA student in search of a research topic who could probably go beyond my impressions to provide solid evidence. Until that happens, this is the best answer I have.

– Bob

This story, “Feast or famine? The IT job outlook,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’s Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com.