Intel's chairman has criticised the IT industry for being ageist when it comes to recruitment and urged older IT professionals to combat this bias by retraining.
Speaking at roundtable event in conjunction with Age Concern, Intel's 66-year-old former chief executive Craig Barrett said the IT industry and government should help older workers keep pace with new technologies.
"Yes there is ageism, not just in the IT industry, but in all industries. Workplaces should recognise the need for skills, as opposed to having to train people from scratch," Barrett told ZDNet UK.
Businesses should focus on ongoing training for staff so they don't become obsolete, while Governments should subsidise retraining for the over 50s, Barrett added.
"Everyone has a responsibility to improve skills. Government run retraining has a role, while businesses such as our own require their professional skills to be updated," said Barrett. "I think every government recognises the need for education and training programmes."
But IT professionals also need to play a role in their own training according to Tristan Wilkinson, the UK public sector director for Intel told ZDNet UK. "If your skill-set is associated with a technology that's approaching the end of its natural life, then you are faced with a choice — you can reskill [sic], or you can follow that technology to the end," he said. "You need to audit yourself and be aware of changes in technology."
However Industry watchers have warned that public sector organisations as well as banks and other financial services companies face a potential legacy skills time bomb. As an aging population of technology workers retire, there could be a severe lack of expertise in programming languages such as COBOL and Fortran.
But a shortage of legacy skills could benefit older workers and go some way to compensate for ageism in the industry according to Bill Bentley, a managing consultant for Fujitsu Business. As more legacy workers retire, the remaining ones will become more highly sought after, he recently told ZDNet UK sister site silicon.com.
"The skills are dwindling so companies have to pay increasingly high contractor rates. If [firms] are running their business on technology that is getting harder to support that will drive a move," said Bentley.
Barrett agreed that as some legacy skills became more scarce, businesses would ultimately pay more for them but added that companies would also look to replace older systems.
"Will supply and demand dictate a rise in wages for COBOL programmers? I think the real issue will be a movement away from older infrastructures, but if you need Fortran, you will end up paying for it," said Barrett.
The Intel chairman added that he wouldn't recommend people train in older programming languages. "There will be a scarcity of expertise, but I wouldn't suggest people major in vacuum tubes, and there's a scarcity of vacuum tubes as well," added Barrett.
Intel and Age Concern have announced an initiative aimed at raising awareness of digital exclusion amongst older people in the UK. The aim is to help older people become more socially included and more employable through improved computing skills.
Talkback
I totally agree, I spent 7 months getting a job.
Retrain! I spent 2 years gaining a MBA as well as keeping my technical skills. Getting an Interview was not difficult. However, it was obvious that I was never going any further...
Thankfully I found a great company that saw the light, that of experience and skills.
Kevin Holdford
Craig Barrett is right to point out that some companies may need to re-evaluate their existing IT systems, as COBOL and Fortran programmers reach retirement age.
However, with 80 per cent of all companies still reliant on their "legacy" systems and 180-200 billion lines of COBOL in existence today, it is unlikely that the need for legacy skills will diminish significantly in the foreseeable future. Indeed, these legacy applications have been built up over a huge period of time, and embody data, processes, rules and concepts that are uniquely entwined with the business - so "ripping and replacing" them would be wholly unacceptable for many companies.
As such, companies must act now to avert a potential skills crisis, and must do so by first getting a better understanding of where the real value lies within their legacy application portfolio. Only then can organisations accurately assess the impact of any loss of legacy skills or business knowledge. Armed with such an understanding, IT departments can invest accordingly - in modern tooling, capable of bringing productivity gains to offset the loss of development staff, and in modern platforms, through application migration, thereby removing the dependance on legacy platform skills.
In a world where delivering business value depends on the ease with which core business systems can be opened up to contemporary architectures and fast-moving delivery channels, competitive advantage will come to those most able to bridge the old and the new. Making legacy skills more accessible to the new generations of IT staff is a vital piece in this endeavour.
I took an early retirement deal in 2000 after 30 years in a UK University IT position. I was then 55. In spite of having a considerable skillset, it took me some months to find another job. This job, with a small company in IT commerce, is primarily technical, but client support skills , "putting in the hours" and strong dedication are also essentials.
After almost six years in my new job, twice employee of the year, I have proved a point to two about the effectiveness of older IT workers.
The UK IT industry has deeply entrenched ageism which is self-defeating.