Making IT cool

The Australian ICT industry, like every other industry in the country, is having to pay an increasing amount of money to hire and retain an ever dwindling pool of available skilled workers.

And while industry organisations such as the Australian Computer Society (ACS) show that part of the problem is underemployment amongst older workers, there are also signs that young people are reluctant to join the industry – partly due to the difficulty previous graduates have experienced and partly because the industry still has a bit of a nerdy, geekdom hangover.

At least one of those factors is changing fast and while employers are still looking for experience (but not too much experience) the rise and rise of interactive technologies is making the ICT industry a little more cool. At least that’s the way employers would like to portray it.

A salary survey carried out by the ACS each year and released this May showed the rate of salary increase for ICT professionals was continuing to rebound after hitting a low of 3.1 percent CAGR in the 2003 survey. Annual salary increases for ICT professionals leading up to the turn of the century (during Y2K and the Dotcom bubble) was in excess of five percent. In the ensuing downturn salary increases cooled somewhat, but by May this year the ACS was able to report a 4.5 percent increase for the previous 12 months.

Given an official Consumer Price Index of 2.4 per cent over the same period and an Average Weekly Earnings increase of 3.4 per cent over a similar period, the increase for ICT workers was pretty much on a par with other professionals (except for the booming mining sector).

At the time ACS President Philip Argy said “salaries for ICT professionals are likely to continue to increase by an average of four to five percent over the next 12 months.”

But while that was back in May, by September, another salary survey, this one conducted by a recruitment firm, showed significant increases over the past 12 months. The annual Greythorn Salary Index uncovered a “sharp spurt in remuneration” resulting in an 11.54 per cent increase for the year.

Chris Digby, CEO, Asia-Pacific, Greythorn Group said it “reflects the limited supply of skilled IT professionals” with critical shortages in high-end IT positions such as project managers, business analysts and software architects and further shortages of C#, C++, .Net and Java developers and so on. The company expects the double-digit salary increases to continue over the next 12 months.

While this is all evidence of a fast-growing economy, significant international demand for IT workers (causing both brain drain and making it harder to import skills), there are two other factors, ACS president Phil Argy highlights as of concern.

Agism operates at both the old and young end of the spectrum, according to ACS research which shows there are two distinct age peaks for unemployment – under 25 and the 41-50 bracket. “The ICT industry’s high level of unemployment for the under 30 age group can be explained by the delay for many in this group in gaining their first job. However, the higher level of unemployment across the 41-50 age group is of concern. It is more likely that this unemployment is derived from a combination of age discrimination and either real or imagined concerns about the currency of their ICT skills,” explained Argy.

But ACS statistics released in September show that unemployment amongst its membership had hit a five-year low with only 3.84 percent looking for a job – a result below the national average for the first time this century and demonstrating an 8.56 percent decrease in the unemployment rate reported by ACS members since 2005. Making better use of our middle-aged technology specialists might resolve an immediate skills shortage, but it’s the other factor that will spell long-term trouble for the ICT industries, or the industries that rely on those skills.

Argy also pointed to the declining supply of graduates due to falling enrolments in tertiary IT courses.

A study of IT enrolments to Australian universities over the period of 2002-2005 revealed the education system was in a state of virtual collapse. While the need for IT skills is growing in the market, the number of students willing to take up university places was falling off.

According to reports this situation continued into 2006 as well. During a period when overall university enrolments increased by seven percent, IT went backward by 18 percent according to a study by Ian Dobson of Monash University’s Centre for Population and Urban Research. In fact, undergraduate enrolment fared worse, falling a staggering 23.6 percent over the period. The situation was compounded by a relative increase in the proportion of international students (growing from 40.5 percent in 2002 to 48 percent of the IT enrolment in 2005) which could see skills taken offshore once their degrees are completed. Other figures collated by the Department of Education, Science and Training show that for 2006 the situation got even worse with 9000 less IT enrolments between 2005 and 2006 – that’s a fall of 18 percent in a single year.

There are signs of hope, however. Monash University, after rejigging its ICT curriculum, working with industry to align course content to industry needs and adding six new majors, actually reversed the trend and grew its applications for the Bachelor of IT and Systems degree from 1610 in 2006 to 2075 in 2007.

But with demand figures such as 171 percent growth in the Internet and multimedia space, it is virtually crisis time for ICT skills in this country and organisations such as the ACS and the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) are working together to try to bolster the image of information technology amongst potential workers of tomorrow.

Sheryle Moon, CEO of the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) said her organisation is working in conjunction with a number of agencies to help promote ICT as a career choice with the ICT: Start Here Go Anywhere campaign running with the Victorian State Government. In fact, Moon said that in the lead up to the federal election, the AIIA called upon both the Coalition and Labor Party to make a commitment to the effort.

“We need to make a concerted effort to attract young Australians into the industry. In the youth space we have also called on both federal parties to adopt ‘Start Here Go Anywhere’ as a national attraction campaign,”
said Moon.

“The campaign is about matching the attributes of the industry with the young people who want to find a job, using demographic and psychographic factors and looking to match what they want with what the industry has to offer,” she said.

Young people today are looking for security and job choice, stimulation and they want to be able to move quickly between industries, explained Moon, adding that research showed Generation Y were passionate about getting an “opportunity to work on the big issues, big problems facing the world”.

“They are interested in the environmental space and whether it is working out how IT can underpin environmental strategies with a bank or with BHP mining, or working for the Government on how ICT can be used to reduce emissions.” We need to show young people how a career in ICT can deliver these sorts of careers, argued Moon.

The program aims to show young people that ICT is not just a vertical industry, but a horizontal one and how the range of ICT careers runs from “fashion to finance, from construction to communications”.

We are trying to make IT cool, said Moon, insisting that the worst of the industries boring geek work is now offshored. “I think what we are doing is outsourcing the lower skilled jobs. We are seeing a move away from legacy systems maintenance work being done locally. There are other countries that can do that cheaper than us,” she said. The local skilled labour will be focusing on how banks can use social networking to better service customers or how online collaboration can get products to market faster. It’s as though there is a growing distance between the engineering aspects of information and communications that differs from those that use ICT as an enabler, with the latter category not needing to be university trained.

“I’ll just make one thing absolutely clear up front,” said John Butterworth, CEO for the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA). “Nobody in the media industry thinks they are working in IT.” But Butterworth has been around long enough to know that they are.

“Like the banking industry and the defence industry and a lot of other industries, they use ICT as the enabler in all this and the people the AIMIA represents (for the most part) are not that technical,” he said, before admitting there are “a lot of the AIMIA members using C++ and ColdFusion in the engine room”.

“The thing that is worth reflecting on is that the skills being used are not specialist skills anymore. Most people of a certain age have picked up the skills in the same way as you might pick up PowerPoint or Microsoft Word,” he said. “There is no longer this great divide between the creative people and tech people and the way we stratify the two. It is all becoming part and parcel of the skills the digital generation has.”

If you look at the people who develop for Facebook for example, often these developers are not your stereotypical Computer Science graduate, they probably used Open Source tools and learned to do the programming themselves. “Often the beauty is not in the coding of it, it’s the creative impetus that led to the idea, said Butterworth.

“Again, the developers who are into .Net or Microsoft Silverlight, they are not your classic techies anymore. Not in the traditional sense. So many people have those skills at the basic level.”

When you consider the recent Neilsen/NetRatings Australian eGeneration Report which found that 92 per cent of young Australians in the 6-17 age group have used the Internet, with 43 percent doing so daily rising to 75 percent of 15-17 year olds as daily users, you start to understand how the skillset for young workers is not necessarily driven by tertiary education. That might be important to a bank, but it is not so important in the burgeoning interactive industries.

Like every other industry, the interactive media industry is struggling to find staff, but a lot of the Web 2.0 work and other activity that is going doesn’t require the the four-year computer science degree, said Butterworth.

“This digital stuff has become sexy again, but it is hard to find people with any level of experience. You know things are tough out there when you see advertising agencies having to start advertising to make the industry look sexy in an effort to attract staff. In the past, ad agencies have turned people away at the door, but now there just aren’t enough people with the experience,” said Butterworth.