IT staff shortage leaves 17,400 jobs to be filled
Booming sector struggling to find skilled workers, says poll
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THE number of job vacancies in computer and information technology (IT) has doubled in just two years to a record 17,400, a new survey has revealed.
The survey is the latest in a series carried out by Dublin City University, whose professor of computing, Michael Ryan, said that many companies have difficulty recruiting staff across a wide range of IT jobs such as web design, embedded systems, IT managers, analysts and programmers.
Many of the present gaps are filled by immigrants, but Prof Ryan has warned that we cannot continue to rely on skilled IT workers from other countries coming to Ireland in large numbers.
"Shortages elsewhere in Europe and competition from the USA suggest that this will be increasingly difficult," he said. "In the longer term, we need to grow our own supply of experts in the core IT areas on which we will depend.
"The shortages indicated by the survey are going to become very serious unless we succeed in interesting both young and old in Information Technology."
The number of students opting for computing courses had plummeted in recent years, prompting campaigns to get students interested in careers in the sector.
This year, there has been a slight upturn in applications but by no means enough to fill the available places.
Prof Ryan said: "We need to get across a more accurate picture of the career opportunities and broad educational benefits of an IT qualification. Unfortunately the echoes of the dot.com collapse still dominate most people's attitudes, and with computing effectively missing from the second-level syllabus, and no real understanding of professional careers in IT, it is hardly surprising that so few choose to study it".
He said that so far, the results of the attempts to remedy this shortfall had fallen well short of what was needed.
"It is a difficult and serious problem, which is not going to be easy to solve." An indication of the scale of the problem was obvious at this year's display of final year projects by BSc in Computer Applications students at DCU, which attracted a record number of potential employers, many of whom spoke of recruitment problems.
"In the USA the situation is similar.
"According to CNN, analysis of job advertisements shows that two of the five 'hottest jobs' in the US involve computing."
Computer programmer comes in the top spot in the US, ahead of healthcare, finance, operations managers, and hardware computer engineers. "This supports a CNN study done in 2006, which found that software development was the best job in the USA, taking into account opportunities, salary, and working conditions," he said.
- John Walshe
