Outsourcer claims skill shortage will raise wages. Will it also help raise H-1B quota?

Is there a shortage of tech workers or isn’t there?

In the answer to that lies the basis for increasing H-1B visa and

L-1 visa quotas.

According to Yoh, an outsourcer of tech talent and a division of Zimmermann and Day, a managed services company, a shortage in talent for research and development and software developers will raise wages in 07.

Of course, this is coming from a company that offers to supply such talent to its customers so it stands to reason if tech specialists require higher salaries Yoh’s cut will also be larger.

The Yoh market report says there will be demand for clinical research associates, biostatisticians, firmware engineers and hardware engineers.

Yoh also predicts demand in technologies like business objects and Java in addition to Microsoft developers, SAS programmers and systems architects.

With the adoption of SOA platforms by the enterprise Yoh also says there will be an increased need for Oracle and SAP “consultants and database administrators.”

The Yoh research quotes Jim Lanzalotto, vice president of Strategy and Marketing at Yoh, saying hiring managers are looking for specialized talent.

“For example, a candidate with .Net developer skills and pharmaceutical experi-ence is far more engaging to a hiring manager than a candidate with skills but not the market expertise or experience,” said Lanzalotto.

However, Norm Matloff, professor of computer science at the University of California, at Davis, scoffs at Lanzalotto’s analysis.

“Employers create their own artificial ‘shortages’ by setting more and more requirements for the job. The hidden agenda here is often to tailor a job to a foreign national they want to hire, or to avoid hiring older–i.e. more expensive–applicants,” said Matloff.

Obviously, the debate over a tech skills shortage or not continues.

But for what it is worth, Yoh also looked at technology skills in demand in 12 major U.S. technology hubs. Here are some of those findings.

Austin/Dallas/Houson: .Net C# Developer, Java/J2EE Architect and Developer, SQL DBA.

Boston: Business Systems Analyst, Project Manager, Clinical Research Associate

Silicon Valley: Firmware Engineer, ASIC Design Engineer, Embedded engineer.

For the full list go to the Yoh report.

I also asked Kim Berry, president of the Programers Guild what he thought of the Yoh report. Here are some of his comments.

“The problem is not a shortage of new graduates. The “shortage” is employers expecting that some other employer had borne the cost of providing on the job training:

“For example, [from the Yoh report] “a candidate with .Net developer skills and pharmaceutical experience is far more engaging to a hiring manager than a candidate with the skills but not the market expertise or experience.”

This basically says “recent grads need not apply.”

In some cases the only reasonable solution is for employers to hire people with general skills, and then provide training and time to learn the specifics of the particular job and business.

Generally the problem is that Congress has allowed employers to flood in foreign workers this decade rather than investing in their staff. Human DNA has not changed much in 15 years. But 15 years ago companies like HP rarely terminated workers, rather they provided them training. Now the buzz word at HP is “churn” – where layoffs of skilled workers and a shortage of skilled workers happen simultaneously.

I just searched YOH in Sacramento – only two openings – and they’ve only been unfilled for a week:

WHY ARE BOTH 5-7 years experience? Because they are probably both fake job ads to sponsor H-1b workers that are coming up on 6 years.