Gaps in IT skills hurting businesses, hindering recovery

The shortage of skilled IT professionals in the Asia-Pacific region is affecting many industries, including the IT industry, and is retarding the ability of economies in the region to rebound from the current economic crisis, according to global IT market-research company Springboard Research.

Following a recent study, the company has released a report entitled Bridging the Gap: Asia-Pacific IT Skills. It says poor availability of both business-domain knowledge and adequate managerial skills are among the top IT skills challenges faced by businesses in the region.

In terms of technology skills, Asia-Pacific companies are finding the greatest shortages in areas like enterprise architecture, application development and system integration.

The report's findings are based on a survey of 400 IT end-users and IT companies, 400 software developers and programmers and 82 IT training and education providers in Australia, China, India, Malaysia and Philippines.

It found that the IT industry's greatest skills-related challenge at the present is not availability, but rather gaps in the available skill pool, said Springboard Research's research manager  Ravi Shekhar Pandey.

"Also, the quality of both technical and non-technical skills is certainly an issue, and where quality is not a concern, it is challenging to find enough people with an adequate blend of skills and experience," Pandey said.

The report points out that while skill shortages appear more acute in the manufacturing and government sectors, the poor skills quality of IT professionals is among the top challenges in the banking and finance industries and government organisations. Lack of IT professionals with business-specific domain knowledge is a big problem for manufacturing and high-tech companies.

However, the slowdown is helping organisations to "retool" their IT skills. More than 70 per cent of the respondent businesses said they were not looking to hire IT staff in the next 6 to 12 months. Of those who were planning to hire, most were looking for people with skills in IT support and maintenance, followed by those with skills in application development and system integration.

The report says Asia-Pacific companies are experiencing the greatest shortages of skills in areas like enterprise architecture, application development and system integration. In terms of vendor-specific skills, Microsoft skills are finding favor with more than 70 per cent of those who are planning to hire new staff, followed by SAP, Oracle and IBM-specific skills.

"We believe that as demand for IT products and services slow down, organisations can acquire new employees and skills without paying a premium. While IT-user companies can use the opportunity to fill gaps in their organisations' skill sets, IT vendors and the local-partner ecosystem can selectively augment their existing staff and build new practices," Pandey said.

The report also says that Microsoft programming languages are the most popular among developers; more than half of those surveyed thought that Java was a must-have language in today's business environment. Java is also the first preference for new learning.

Developers are also interested in acquiring skills beyond language and technology. Thirty-seven per cent of those interviewed claimed that the acquisition of skills in project management was their top priority. In terms of vendor-specific skills, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP are developers' top three priorities.

The survey of IT training and education providers in Asia Pacific revealed that courses in Java and C++ languages are most popular and in demand. Web services and XML, Security Management and Software and System Testing are the top technology-specific skills courses offered by the providers.