Tech Jobs Outnumber Applicants, 4:1

Tech Jobs Outnumber Possible Applicants 4:1

A study in April of 2007 from the non-profit Software Human Resource Council (SHRC) has called attention to the severe gap between the number of job openings in the Canadian ICT sector, 35,000 each year, and the number of students graduating from Canadian universities with computer science or engineering degrees, 7,000 each year. The number of new hires needed is expected to increase to 89,000 over the next three or four years, according to the SHRC. SHRC President Paul Swinwood says, “We’re looking at a maximum of 7,000 coming out of the school system. We’re trying to figure out where the heck the rest of the people are going to come from.”

The article is about Canadian Universities; however, I believe it is also applicable to US colleges. The issue is 2-fold, I think. We are not providing suitable training at collefes and tech schools and employers are not making use of the people we produce.

Fold A: We are not providing grist suitable for the mill.

1. The employers are requesting employees with very deep but narrow skill-sets
2. State colleges, and other traditional schools are not teaching those skill-sets, since they want to have a set of classes that is foundational to all higher skill-sets.
3. Schools are not teaching the more expensive application packages. We do not teach Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which has a cost. We teach Fedora Core, which as Red Hat’s Experimental test-bed, is like using a strong Beta version. We do nothing hands-on with Oracle or the ISS
security suite, because licensing restrictions and costs make it too expensive to set up all these students as users.

Though PHP is currently running #2 or 3 for server-side programming, you would expect to be able to get at least an intro class in that script. Not available, even at the better tech schools. We are still teaching Visual Basic here, and almost nobody is actually doing anything substantive in VB. The Microsoft houses have gone to its successor, the creatively untitled “.net”

The powers that be only say that VB has a good Development environment, so you can write a process in VB to see if the logic works, and then write it in Visual C++ to use it. I would think it simpler to just learn the Visual C++ IDE and skip the VB part altogether.

There are jobs requiring Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP training and experience. Show me a school that teaches these. Mostly, intros to such things are costly weekend seminars. It would be interesting to get the major software and hardware vendors involved in education in ways deeper than merely hooking young students on their operating system like technological crack.

Fold B: Students are studying engineering and especially CS because they think it will make them a lot of money, easily. When they discover that a 2-year degree that doesn’t prepare anyone for any real work also doesn’t get them an automatic job, people are leaving the field as quickly
as they can. There is supposedly a phobia among students (I hear) that Computer Science jobs are hard to get. This may be true, but it is made worse by the undeniable fact that the students’ pre-college education so ill-prepares most of them for the mathematics which occasionally arise in CS programs. I can think of nobody who made it really big automatically, even in the height of the Internet Bubble of the 1990s.

To make use of the people who are available, there is a real need for training of employers to get them to find some reason why it is cost-effective to hire and trained students, or even to retrain experienced technologists.

The solution that employers are using is hiring people from other countries and occasionally outsourcing jobs and business processes to other countries. Help-desk departments are not the only processes being outsourced. Development is also going overseas. The solution that colleges must embrace is to become agile. Schools have to teach what employers demand. We as educators must provide what the market desperately wants, which today appears to be narrowly-trained individuals with much depth in their focus.