Curtis Brown, CTO of the Princeton Review, an educational services company providing books and test preparation materials
to schools and students, says many valuable employees stayed in place, accepting their salaries and riding out the recession.
“I believe the best people were hiding out and hunkering down, and they didn’t want to come up,” Brown says. “But that situation
may change as opportunities for IT professionals increase. I’m finding it’s more competitive to get people at a fair price,”
Brown says. He plans to add people to his 70-person staff in the coming months.
Similarly, at Golden Gate University, CTO Anthony Hill has avoided any layoffs in the past three years for his staff, which
includes 28 full-time and 12 part-time workers. Raises of “a few percentage points” were issued in 2003 and are expected in
2004.
The university endorsed investment in IT as a strategic priority, so Hill’s budget, at more than $5 million, has allowed him
to invest in IT infrastructure.
Still, Hill does not plan to expand his staff in the coming year. “My challenge will be to continue to evolve IT and to maintain
salaries at the current levels,” he says. “I’ll make new hires as people leave, but I won’t be able to make new hires.”
In the current environment, most employed professionals were not actively looking to jump ship, according to our survey. Asked
to describe their attitude toward seeking another job,
Forty percent said they weren’t looking; 35 percent said they were passively looking and open to opportunities; and just 13
percent were looking at another company. Six percent were looking within their company; 3 percent were passively looking at
opportunities outside the IT field; and 2 percent were actively looking outside the IT field.
At Boeing, where more than 15,000 of its 150,000 employees are involved in IT functions, there is a demand for people with
key skill sets, says CTO Gene Rogers. “It’s an employer’s market,” he says. “At the same time, key skills are in high demand.
Competitors want to pluck out top ranks so we find ourselves under pressure to provide level increases to our staff.”
The fear of offshoring
Offshore outsourcing is on the minds of many IT workers as they ponder their place in the job market, the survey shows. But
in practice, IT managers are not planning on tapping overseas markets as much as one might expect.
When asked to list their concerns about job security, 22 percent listed offshore outsourcing behind budget constraints (49
percent), reduced demand for the company’s products and services (32 percent), status as a senior-level worker or as one earning
too much money (28 percent), and issues with co-workers or management (24 percent).
In practice, the use of offshore labor seems less of a real threat than our respondents feared. When asked how their company’s
staffing needs will be filled in the next year, only 4 percent cited offshore outsourcers, whereas 85 percent said they will
use full-time employees and 11 percent indicated use of U.S.-based contractors.
Meta Group’s Schafer agrees that fear of offshore outsourcing is outstripping reality. “The number of companies engaging in
offshore outsourcing is really limited,” Schafer says. “If you are an average U.S. company with U.S. customers, do you want
to complicate your life with language, culture, or time zone differences? The bulk of the work is by [IT] vendors making real
economies of scale in development work and call center staffing.”
Even though he is out of a job, IT veteran Brad Mitchell refuses to blame offshore outsourcing. “I’m not so sure they [overseas
workers] are taking away jobs,” Mitchell says. “Those positions often involve grunt-level code jobs,” he says. “For the strategic
jobs such as business analysis and business engineering, you need to stay at home.”
Offshore outsourcing reflects the nature of the new global economy, where corporations hire workers where they please. Gene
Rogers, for example, says Boeing relies on offshoring because of the company’s global reach. “We sell Boeing airliners worldwide,
and if a [foreign] country is going spend billions of dollars, they want local participation.
“It’s a growing factor for us,” Rogers says. “In IT, we’ve had software development in Russia for over 10 years and we are
continuing with new markets like India.”
Coming to grips with growth
Meta Group’s Schafer says that when the moratorium on IT spending and training comes to an end, pent-up demand for workers’
talents will be released. “Companies have not been doing what they need to do to keep their [IT] skills up,” Schafer says.
“There will be a shift in perception that this needs to happen, and that will lead to a seller’s [worker’s] market.”
It’s not clear exactly when this shift will occur. Given that there have been so many fits and starts in the recent past,
it’s risky to predict what direction the economy will take. But for now, the compensation survey at least shows that the bleeding
has stopped.
E-mail
Printer Friendly
Reprints
(InfoWorld) - In the litigious world we live in, deploying a unified communications platform in your enterprise could...
