sirenianshores

Skills shortage ‘hurting indigenous tech industry’ - SiliconeRepublic.com

The recent job losses at Pfizer and Motorola are disguising a wider issue that is hurting the performance of Ireland’s indigenous tech sector, namely that there actually aren’t enough people to meet the 74pc increase in demand for IT people in Ireland.

According to System Dynamics managing director Tony McGuire, an ill-informed and hysteric Irish media has gotten it wrong and his own company’s experiences paint a different picture to the outlook for jobs in Ireland.

“The intensity of media coverage regarding the potential job losses at Motorola and more recently at Pfizer that suggests that all industry in Ireland is in meltdown is ill-informed nonsense,” said McGuire.

Skills shortage ‘hurting indigenous tech industry’ screams the headline. Irish employers are seemingly baffled why more people are no longer being attracted to work for them. So let’s look at the prospects which Irish companies have offer potential employees:

1. Long hours
2. Stagnant wages
3. Zero job security
4. Inadequate or non-existent training
5. Unpaid overtime

Those aspects combined with the implied threat that the entire industry may decamp to some cheaper a third world country if Irish employees demand higher wages. Naturally, the smarter, more clued in young people have declined to go into IT and have chosen safer careers like the traditional civil service where the majority of the jobs pay more than a job in IT ever will. I’ve been through to job losses in the five years since I finished college and at this point wouldn’t recommend IT as a career to anyone.

“The reality of our own experience backed up an IT industry survey recently that we have 74pc more vacancies in our industry now than we had two years ago. There is a lot of demand and far too few people available to do the work.”

Translation: we cannot find enough people (to work for the meagre wages we are prepared to offer them). Perhaps if we paid more, we wouldn’t be having this problem in the first place.

McGuire said that while his sympathies lie with the Motorola and Pfizer workers who have been made redundant, sensationalist coverage suggesting mass job losses across the Irish technology industry are incorrect and could wrongly inform young people’s career choices, leading to even worse problems down the road.

The impact of the negative coverage of the dotcom downturn of 2000 and 2001 led to fewer students opting for IT courses at third level and this is just one factor that is impacting the recruitment efforts of Irish IT firms.

“I am not for a moment belittling the real shock that people face when they lose their jobs when companies shut down or pull out of the country,” McGuire said, “but the way this is being reported is tabloid news at its worst and has a very serious hidden effect.

Blaming the media for their predicament is a classic example of shooting the messenger and avoiding responsibility for the problem. People aren’t stupid. They can see the situation with their own eyes and don’t necessarily require a ’sensationalist’ media to point the obvious to them. The Silicone Republic article like a lot of other stuff on the site is little more than business propaganda disguised as ‘news’.

I quote again:
“Shock-and-scare headlines influence both students and parents in choosing or advising on third-level courses, which in turn will affect their future career choices. Bad (but inaccurate) news about IT jobs discourages graduates from joining the industry.

Then he says:
“The reality in the IT industry in Ireland is that the days of having many young qualified graduates ready and available to take up programming jobs for the multinationals are well and truly over.

Translation: the glory days are over. Outsourcing has destroyed programming as a viable career for Irish graduates. Perhaps Irish companies outsourcing and cutting employee benefits is inevitable in order for them to compete. But then why complain when that in turn inevitably discourages people from working for them?

Another factor could be the arrival in Ireland of large internet firms like Google, Yahoo!, Amazon and eBay, all of whom can pay competitive salaries, benefits and stock options, making it harder for indigenous firms to compete for human capital.

Competition is such a bitch isn’t it?

McGuire warned that the real high-value jobs in the IT industry – designers, analysts, process experts and sales and marketing – are available but the people are hard to find.

Of course what he doesn’t mention is to get to those high-level jobs, people need to start at an entry-level and work their way up. Outsourcing has made this more difficult by removing the bottom rung of the ladder. By shipping the programming jobs (which people traditionally started out in) to places like India, China and the Philippines. It also means that people who enjoy working with technology will be less attractive to an industry which now only offer jobs in the business end of things.

System Dynamics, one of Ireland’s oldest IT firms, last year won the prestigious IBM Business Partner of the Year Award.

Despite such accolades and a longstanding reputation in the industry, where System Dynamics competes successfully against big-five players, McGuire said his company meets with a wall of indifference in an Irish public sector intent on spending tax payers money on “reassuringly expensive” brands.

“Too often we hear that the ‘big brands’ are chosen because they are ‘reassuringly expensive’.

You get what you pay for. Many Irish IT companies offer the cheapest possible price, which consequently gives the cheapest possible service. The result is they look like a bunch of cowboys compared with the more professional multinational organisations which are better resources and more money to motivate people and train them up to a higher standard.

“Multinationals will come and go but local companies of the right scale, credibility and capability will always add to this economy and society.

“To build Irish IT companies of scale needs the support of Irish industry and the Irish public sector,” McGuire iterated.

As Irish employers are so keen to point out: it’s a hyper-competitive, cut-throat world. The Irish public sector should not be expected to effectively prop up and subsidise the Irish IT industry. They owe the IT industry nothing.

The bottom line is Irish employers need to compete more to attract people to the industry. If they are not prepared to do that, then they have no right to complain if people turn their backs on them.