Management Toolkit

Story: IT recruitment crisis deepens

• 
• 

Silicon's skills survey provides interesting...

Silicon's skills survey provides interesting food for thought. However, while the report is right to highlight the shortage of Java and HTML-trained IT professionals, it neglects to mention that many companies are also struggling to recruit programmers skilled in COBOL, the lifeline of more than 70% of today’s Enterprise IT Applications.

Recent research by Micro Focus of 650 customers and prospects revealed that more than three-quarters of CIOs expect the recruitment of COBOL programmers to remain a key focus of their IT departments over the next five years, while 73 percent indicated trained COBOL professionals can be hard to find. Since COBOL runs around 75% of the world’s business transactions every day and those with sufficient COBOL skills are approaching retirement age, it is now more important than ever to take action against a potential skills crisis in the future.

Organisations must take active responsibility for training their staff in such vital IT skills. They should also take advantage of vendor initiatives to support academic foundations to educate current and future employees, to secure a balanced supply of skills and a smooth transition of knowledge in the future. In an industry where people and skills are prime assets, organisations need to apply some careful thought to “Succession Planning” to leverage continued returns from their IT investments.

Arunn Ramadoss - Head, Academic ConnecTIONs (ACTION) Program, Micro Focus

• 
• 

• 
• 
• 

Full Talkback thread