Prejudice contributes to IT skills shortage

Added by Editor on 2 June 2011.
Saved under Lara Pienaar, Opinion, Top

[By Lara Pienaar]

A persistent bias in favour of university qualifications over technikons coupled to a growing perception that tertiary education standards are dropping at some institutions is compounding the recruitment crisis in the IT industry.

The IT industry is adding to its own woes by basing its employment policies on the prerequisite of a university degree from a few selected universities. The industry already faces a range of issues including a critical shortage of skills, inflated salaries and employees who frequently change jobs, yet many companies are not prepared to broaden their horizons when it comes to recruitment.

Candidates with a diploma from a technikon are also an excellent choice because their qualifications have the edge when it comes to practical knowledge and application, yet many of our clients won’t even look at their CVs. Moreover, many companies have voiced concern about a perceived lowering of standards at some universities and are becoming even more prescriptive about the origin of the candidates’ degrees.

This narrow focus is surprising, particularly in light of the critical skills shortage in the IT industry and it is counter-productive.

We see candidates who are equally competent, regardless of whether they graduated from a technikon, a “blue-chip” university or a distance-learning institution. We also see highly skilled candidates who haven’t completed formal education but who have years of invaluable practical experience — and the playing fields should be levelled.

By way of illustration, almost 70% of candidates placed by Network IT Recruitment in the first quarter of 2011 had university degrees. With skills in high demand and huge pressure on companies to complete projects within deadline to avoid penalties means that our clients end up overpaying skilled candidates which in turn results in great difficulty for a candidate to move at a later stage. The scenario could be quite different if employers were prepared to consider applicants whose qualifications were outside of their prescribed framework.

Further fall-out from the skills shortage and recruitment policies is that many IT specialists “job hop”. To counter this, there has been a marked trend in recent months for candidates to sign restraint contracts, specifically in instances where companies paid for technical certifications. Companies are also being forced to offer greater financial incentives to IT personnel to encourage loyalty and staff retention.

A great deal of high-quality IT candidates are being denied the opportunity to tell their story. The prospective employers won’t even consider their CVs, let alone grant them an interview. Frankly, employers are shooting themselves in the foot. However, I believe it’s only a matter of time before the situation reaches tipping point and companies will be forced to broaden their recruitment policies. Let’s not forget that Bill Gates was a university drop-out.

  • Pienaar is a senior IT recruitment consultant of Network IT Recruitment

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  • Past IT-all

    Right! Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard. Some of the most successful business people I have known have had a Standard Six education. My nick-name at work was “Professor” because no one else had the IT skills that I possessed. But in this socio-political world, if one’s university isn’t right, one’s age, colour, gender, past experience, present knowledge, et.al., is not 500% more than what the company wants, no ways, no chance of a position, irrespective of how good one may be at one’s work. If the academic piece of paper isn’t exactly what the employer wants (whether or not the person holding the paper actually knows anything, which I doubt) there is no job offer. They’d rather give the job to someone who holds all the correct papers but knows aboslutely nothing, and demands the highest salary! It’s time for employers to wake up, take their heads out of the sand, and stop being so damned picky!

  • http://analysis102.blogspot.com Michael

    I would suggest there is another problem in that not enough talented and intelligent school leavers are choosing an IT related career. They rather choose courses like accounting and finance and don’t even consider IT even though their prospects in IT would be a lot better.

    The other problem is that there is a lot of dud talent around. i.e. people with some kind of certificate but who are actually poor. It requires a very skilled employer to fish out the poorly skilled individual at the interview stage – possibly a reason why they prefer degreed candidates (although this is also not a guarantee of ability).

    It tends to be the less skilled who are normally looking for work as the skilled employees are happy where they are.

    Companies can take two strategies for finding talent, head hunt, or take the long term view and hire talented recent graduates and invest in them to train and give them experience – they will eventually repay that investment. Both strategies are challenging.

  • kidblack

    I have no IT related degree. My skills are the result of a passion for IT since birth.

    The result? My CV got overlooked (even though i have an extensive blog listing completed projects).

    And now? I started my own company, and make more in a month than i used to in a year.

    The lesson? I think recruiters are wrongfully using a cookie cutter approach, and their clients are missing out on some exceptional talent. Talent that ends up going on their own, and charging those same companies 3x the price they would have had to pay had they insisted on demonstrable skills instead of some piece of paper.

    I am now in the same boat with regard to recruiting talent. I dont use agents, and I dont care about qualifications, instead with about 5 carefully crafted interview questions I can make a decision, which 9 times out of 10 is the right one. And, incidentally, half of the “degreed” people I have interviewed dont have a clue. Since it seems they always saw IT as a means to an end, and didn’t spend most Friday nights passionately hacking away at some piece of code, or server, or tech.

  • http://www.cablemap.info Greg

    @kidblack 100% agreed, I’m in the same boat; we stopped using recruiting agencies long ago, I assume it’s the same for other industries, but in IT, they don’t understand the content and complementary skills on CVs in front of them. They don’t understand that passion is as important as skill.

    We get as much talent as we can by word of mouth, and have found two good people by emailing guys with blogs about coding, and basically poaching them.

    >> Since it seems they always saw IT as a means to an end,

    That’s the most important question. “When you’ve coded all day at work, do you go home and code all night?” … it’s the only prepared question I have when I interview a candidate – the rest is just a chat, and you get a sense of the person organically. Setting tasks is useless, you get a myopic view of skills; you can usually find out in casual conversation how deep their technical understanding on any subject is.

    But that’s fine. Let the corporates get all the recruitment agency CV checkbox talent, and us entrepeneurs will get the cream of the crop. Most the top guys don’t like the environment of corporates and usually work their way out of the system into smaller companies that allow more freedom to explore their interests.

  • http://hittingthewire.co.za DaveG

    Let’s first start by conceding that Bill Gates is not the ideal benchmark for the average bloke in the group of people we’re looking at here shall we? He’s exceptional.

    There is a skills shortage, no question. The more useful questions here are “what specific skills are we short of?”, “who has them?”, “how did they get them?”, “how best to produce more of them?” These awesome of the issues the Cape IT Initiate are grappling with and working at solving.

    I wholeheartedly agree that a piece of paper stating that you have survived X years at Y institution does not necessarily make you the best candidate for the job. I also agree that there are vital things like “attitude” and “experience” that cannot be trained and should count in an employer’s eyes. However, if I’m looking for an Enterprise Architect or Business Analyst, I’m going to be adding a weighting in favor of individuals with degrees over diplomas or no tertiary education. Experience in business and operations is going to count. If I’m looking for a PHP or Python dev on the other hand, clearly a degree is going to have very little weighting.

    Geeks are notoriously bad at selling themselves to potential employers. Your CV (if that is the first billboard your target – you have a target right? – is going to see) needs to be arresting, whatever qualifications you have. If it doesn’t scream “PICK ME, I”M WORTH TALKING TO!” you’re not doing it right. If the employer is refusing to see a potential developer’s CV because he/she has no degree, then they deserve to miss the talent. Recruitment agencies that know how to match geeks to the places they will thrive and add value are there, they’re just rare.

    And while I will concede that tasks are not always appropriate Greg, if they are designed cleverly you can filter out the pretenders and use the process (as opposed to the result) to identify character, attitude, perseverance, resourcefulness as well as knowledge, skill, etc.

    This article and comments have raised some good issues that I’d like to feed into the CITi skills development process.

    Now, how about a debate on why SA corporates are outsourcing dev work to India when we have guys like Greg and kidblack around? ;)

  • Boodaleh

    Also, Steve Jobs and Mark Zukerburg, (founders of Apple and Facebook respective) dropped out of college

  • Joey

    Agreed!!!!!

  • Darren

    Also Agreed! I understand that you all have had bad experiences with recruiters who do not understand that a passionate developer develops after hours (and all hours for that matter) – but I beg to differ. If you go to one hairdresser that accidentally cuts your hair into a disaster, you do not stop going to any hairdressers… for the rest of your life. You find a one that knows what they are doing!

  • manesh

    Considering this article is written by an employee of a company who earns commission of placing candidates and then also benefits from ‘job hopping’, it seems more of a petty winge.

    This article is similar to the CEO of a prominent estate agency complaining that banks don’t want to approve bank loans.

    Once again, commission based agencies complaining because they not making commissions. So what happens, is that an article,like this, gets written for a business to take on the risk. When a business has to make a concession, the business deals with the problem relating to that concession, not the agent who walks off with the commission.

    There is a skills shortage in our country. I have sat in panels in many interviews. There is a significant difference in candidates from some institutions versus others. One sometimes wonders what gets taught and how certificates are handed out. On very rare occasions do we see candidates that are outstanding, those candidates are snapped up within days of coming on the market.

  • crITter

    I have to agree with kidblack. I work for an online media/IT company that has become fairly large/prominent. It was started by a coder WITH NO FORMAL QUALIFICATIONS IN IT. He developed (and is continually developing) the platform it runs on. He doesn’t do the Friday night coding anymore (he has a wife and kid) but otherwise you’ll find him doing what he loves several nights a week and at least one night on weekends, in addition to his “day-job” of running his company. Where do you think he’d be if he’d relied on a recruitment agency to finally place him?

  • Barrel Roll

    Come on Techcentral, what’s the deal with this tame PR puffery? You can get better columnists than this

  • http://www.cablemap.info Greg

    @DaveG I agree that in some instances qualifications can be important, but my feeling about them, is that they can only be used to measure the minimum capabilities of a candidate, and nothing for potential. This is fine in a corporate environment where the bare minimum will keep things ticking over.

    As for the tasks – if the candidate’s skills are in question (ie. they were not referred or recommended), we ask them to bring the work they’re most proud of to the interview and go through it with them on the boardroom screen… that way you get to see what their idea of “showing off their skills” are… a lot of the time it’s rather alarming what people put on CVs as “skill level: expert”.

  • Mohammed

    Attention: IT Management in KZN.

    I am conducting a dissertation study as part of my MBA. My study is titled: “Information and Communications Technology Skills Shortage in KwaZulu-Natal: Fact or Fiction?”. The aim of this study is to determine whether or not there exists a skills shortage in the ICT industry in Durban. Through your participation in this study, I hope to identify and gain a clearer understanding about this subject.

    The survey will take less than fifteen minutes to complete and your input will be immensely valuable.

    Please click on the link below to complete the survey and I thank you in advance for your support and participation in my study.

    http://ICTSurveyKZN.questionpro.com

    Many Thanks
    Mohammed Amod

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