I.T. Staff Shortage Looming

Top Tech News has a good analysis of a possible IT shortage that may be on the horizon. I do have a couple of questions fromthe article though. If this shortage is looking where will the shortage be most pronounced?? I believe two of the areas will be related to networking and open-software support. After that I'm not sure where demand will come from. This will be something that will be critical to properly prepare oneself for the next ten years.

The next question I have coming from this article is to question their idea that 60% of corporate IT professionals will assume business-facing roles. this is a key assumption for this whole scenario to take place. Their math goes along the line that in a 100 man operation during the course of the next 5 years there will be a 33% drawdown in demand for IT jobs. So the 100 man operation is going to be reduced to a 66 man operation. Of the 100 men located in the operation 60 people will take on more business-facing roles. Also, of the 100 men located an additional 10 -15 will drop out of the field. The article also spends considerable amount of space discussing the lack of young people moving into the IT field. So now our 100 man operation is turning into something closer to 25 - 30 men. This creates a deficit of 36 - 41 people.

Plenty has been written about how automation is going to cut jobs within the IT sector. One thing that has not been written is what effect does promotion have within the IT sector. In my mind that is the larger quesiton that is looming.

On a similar note Redmondmag.com has a good article titled "Taking Control of your Career." Which lists some other factors that go along way towards improving an IT career.

A final note is a good story from news.yahoo.com which covers the possibility of indian call center reps collecting user information and selling it on the black market (Australian police probing Indian call centre fraud claim). I don't think corporations were thinking of this type of security concern when they decided on outsourcing services overseas.