Solving the IT Skills Crisis By Titu Sarder For the past ten years, companies have systematically outsourced IT skills to meet their growing information needs. Often, this outsourcing came with attractive price points and with short time frames to deploy critical new applications. This allowed companies to “buy time” from the perceived pain of internal training efforts and from the lengthy recruit-ment times for needed skills.

Now the trend has come full circle, as many of the same organizations have realized how critical their IT initiatives are to corporate business viability. While outsourcing will remain as a viable option, companies also want the assurance of knowing that a set of business-critical skills resides within their own internal IT staffs. Consequently, we are seeing a trend in companies of reinsourcing critical IT skills that drive the end business.

The U.S. IT skills shortage comes at a time when a shortage of IT skills is being experienced worldwide. Recent United Kingdom figures reveal that one-third of businesses are now impacted by the inability to find the right IT talent for their business needs. A CNET (www.cnet.com) report published in September 2007 indicated that the IT skills gap was literally costing Europe “billions” in investments. One industry analyst assessed the European information illiteracy level at almost 40%. The problem is even surfacing in newer technology centers like India.

The message is clear: companies must find ways to train or hire the critical skills that their internal staffs need to support key areas of the business, even if part of their strategy is outsourcing.

The View from NetCom
At NetCom, we are in the business of IT training. Our resources are directed at addressing the IT skills crisis by availing the most effective, state of the art training content and methods possible. We cannot do this without an active collaboration with our clients, our vendor business partners and our online and in-class instructors to ensure the delivery of training and skills that are immediately applicable in the “trenches” of corporate technology. We also regularly survey the market, and work with IT students to assure the best possible learning techniques for knowledge transfer.

We know that best-of-class training happens when it delivers critical skills back to the IT workforce that can be immediately ap-plied to technology projects. This requires the delivery of both in-class and online learning formats; comprehensive training to the latest levels of industry and vendor certifications; and consultative work with our clients and technology workers for superior tech-nology results that deliver immediate value today, while they build bridges to the future.

Bringing New Skills to the Crisis
The IT skills crisis won’t be solved overnight, nor is training the only method through which it will be solved.

Companies have many different paths to skills acquisition that are open to them, including hiring top talent, outsourcing to expert talent, actively seeking technologies with smaller learning curves, and even extending the life of older IT technologies in the busi-ness until the necessary skill sets are built or acquired.

However, there is no strategy better suited to delivering lasting investment into a company’s IT workforce than professional development and training in key skills areas. The payoffs are happy employees who are more likely to stay with the company when they see they are being invested in; new technology projects that begin to come online as the company pulls itself up by its own bootstraps; and a growing arsenal of new technology skills that can be continuously applied to emerging IT initiatives. From an educational standpoint, this means the successful transfer of both creative problem solving and highly specific technical skills, along with the building of “soft” skills in project management that ensure that all ends of a technology project come together.

About The Author

Titu Sarder is a founding member of NetCom Information Technology and is the Chairman &
Chief Operating Officer of NetCom. He works with companies to help them define their IT strategies and training needs.

Comments? Questions? Send them to editor@technologytrainingmag.com.