Training day, not hiring day, is the focus of IT departments planning to fill internal skills gaps in the next few months, depriving IT temps of a normally reliable way to cash in.
Despite concerns about their value, an internal IT training scheme is the priority for 70% of IT leaders tasked with boosting the technical abilities of their on-site IT team.
Speaking to pollsters for computer jobs agency Modis, half the IT leaders said their techies weren’t adept on systems already in place to effectively support the outfit’s wider objectives.
And upgrading the organisation’s hardware won’t help, a third of the leaders suggested, as the existing IT team wouldn’t “have the right expertise to cope with new systems at all.”
But rather than hiring, IT leaders say they will plug the skills gap by training existing staff already on the payroll, implying IT departments “lack the resources to invest in new talent.”
“Under greater pressure to make technology deliver commercial objectives,” Modis added, IT leaders “don’t have the tools and in some cases the teams to do all aspects of the job.”
Managing director Jim Albert sympathised, saying commercial demands on IT personnel were often “highly complex”, requiring specific knowledge of statistics and data management systems.
Still, just 15 per cent of the IT leaders are considering outsourcing their IT needs as a result, and only a “very few” said they would respond to the knowledge gap by hiring new IT workers.
One obvious exception is Google, which last week said 2011 will be its “biggest hiring year” so far, indicating that the search giant will take on at least 6,200 workers over the next 10 months.
Source:http://www.contractoruk.com/news/005226.html
