On the other hand, it is fair to say many Australian companies have been at least as good as US ones at poaching recruits from elsewhere rather than investing in new skills, an approach Issa points out is incredibly short-sighted. Issa sees little sign of a skills crisis in most areas of IT, if only because most companies have not been doing much at all over recent times, but says there are critical shortages in newer technologies like VoIP. However, Issa would never dream of just poaching those people from elsewhere, even if they were readily available. It is just not in his company's long-term interest, he says.
"You need to invest in people and give them the opportunity, which is what we've done here," Issa says. "We started a VoIP roll-out two years ago and now we've got people who knew nothing about VoIP two years ago but now have got just as much experience or more experience than anyone in the marketplace. Some people see that as: 'You will lose these experienced people to other companies'. I actually see it the other way around. My view is always that you give people opportunities and they'll stay. If you don't give them the opportunities they will leave and go where the opportunities are."
Nevertheless, as Issa points out, when there is a skills shortage, there tends to be a skills shortage worldwide - it is folly to assume you will be able to recruit at will.
But when it comes to the broader picture of grooming folk for the CIO role, it seems the current climate means CIOs see the future at best through a glass darkly, as it were.
That is not really surprising - after all, Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) policy manager Michael Hedley says the current picture on skills and jobs demand is "very mixed".
"Is there a skills shortage?" Hedley queries. "Well the real issue, which we're trying to produce some work on, is the demand side, because unless we know what the demand is we can't really say the number of graduates coming out isn't at the right level at the right time."
To that end the AIIA is working with the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA) to examine trends and future developments in Australia's information and communications technology (ICT) sector and their implications for ICT skills development. DCITA's new Information and Communications Technology Skills Foresighting Working Group, on which Hedley sits, is analyzing emerging ICT requirements in the hope it can improve the identification of skills in demand and the options for training and other initiatives to enable more effective ICT skills development.
It is not a small ask. For one thing, Hedley points out, assessing demand is a bit like measuring that proverbial piece of string: simply going to employers to collect demand information is fairly useless, because most employers simply are not looking into the long distance. They have a pretty good idea of the new recruits they need over the next six to 12 months but beyond that the picture gets pretty sketchy, particularly in such an uncertain economic climate.
"The problem is that we have a short business cycle which runs alongside an academic cycle of three to five years," Hedley says.
And of course different companies are in different stages of their employment cycle, further complicating the picture. That makes other economic indicators important. For example, apart from a bit of a bump around the turn of the century, the long-term trend line in the growth of ICT employment has been pretty steady, suggesting the number of people employed in ICT occupations is still growing somewhere between 3 and 5 percent a year.
Further, Hedley says, things are looking up for prospective employees, with more jobs apparently on offer. Salary packaging remains pretty stable yet a small percentage of positions are proving difficult to fill, with CXOs complaining of the difficulty of hiring very senior major project managers and senior high-level account managers.
However, it is when you look at the changes in the types of people being employed that the picture becomes clearer. Demand for specialist ICT graduates - the honours students and those who have completed a masters degree, for instance - remains strong, particularly amongst companies with a computing engineering division involved in high-level research.
"Those top-level performers probably have three or four job offers in their second year or third year, so the demand for really good graduates is really there," Hedley says. "But for the rest, we are hearing companies now - because the focus is so much in Australia particularly on the business side, services side - are hiring from a wider graduate pool than before.
"One of the trends . . . we hear people talking about is that companies are certainly interested in hiring people with business experience. IT is something that we are having a bit of a look at. One of the things that has happened is that the majors have restarted their graduate hire and the graduate cadet programs, although probably not at the numbers that they used to sustain in the mid to late 90s."
"I think in today's market we're seeing that we need to find ways to get those guys in, to start to build up their skills and give them the organizational opportunities to focus on other areas of our business," says Dimension Data Australia CIO Paul Christensen.
In fact Christensen thinks his own pathway through the internal IT organization is worthy of emulation. He moved up to the CIO role after filling a range of different roles within both operational and administrative areas of IT within the development group. "That really allowed me to have a very broad look at the whole team and be able to say, 'Well, here's where we need to focus at an operational level, a general management level'; so it put me in good stead in terms of being able to manage quite a diverse workforce."
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