Google getting plenty of graduates while NICTA CTO laments shortage

Stan Beer
Friday, 08 June 2007 22:33

IT People - Enterprise

The chief technology officer of Federal Government funded ICT research organization NICTA has sounded the alarm bells about the lack of Australian students  pursuing IT degrees. However, despite the shortage of IT graduates, Google Australia & New Zealand says it is getting plenty of applicants for jobs but wants more.

According to Dr Chris Nicol, CTO at NICTA there is such a shortage of students studying computer science these days in Australia that even Google is having trouble getting them. Dr Nicol points out that the downward trend for students commencing IT studies stands in stark contrast to nearly all other professions.

"In management and commerce, there were 50,383 commencements in 2001, while in 2005, there were 54,062." he says. "In all industry sectors the way to growth and increased exports is to use IT to add value. Many other countries are recognizing this, yet in Australia despite our strong economic growth when all these students start graduating, there's not going to be many of them."

Dr Nicol says he has spoken to a number of key employers of IT in Australia, one of which is Google, which have complained that they are having difficulty finding talent in Australia.

"I sat down with the head of Google Labs in Australia (Alan Noble, engineering director, Google ANZ) and asked him how does he find hiring," says Dr Nicol. "If Google's having trouble (hiring graduates) that tells me either the quality has dropped or the number has dropped.  I have formed a consortium of companies in the space of embedded systems and we sit down and talk about how we're going to get more high school students to study IT at university.

"In 2005, 9277 students commenced studying IT. In 2001, it was 17058," said Dr Nicol. "As a percentage of total (new students), it dropped from 7% down to 3.5%."

"Universities are telling us that they dpn't have enough students commencing," says Dr Nicol. "And they can't afford to keep their research staff and their lecturers. So they're scaling back their computer science schools. So they're seeing the pain before employers do."

Dr Nicol believes the lack of interest in studying IT is largely a branding issue. "There has been a significant increase in the number of students wishing to study forensic science (because of TV show CSI). There will be a surplus of forensic scientists. With the collapse of companies like OneTel and the exit of some of the well known telecommunications R&D labs like Ericsson, an image is put out that it going to be difficult to find employment."

So what sort of work is available for computer science graduates?  Exciting work, according to Dr Nicol.

"I think that there's going to be a wide array of opportunities, particularly in the area of what I call real-time embedded programming," says Dr Nicol.

"Of the number of processors being deployed today, 98% of them are actually deployed in devices that are not computers. They're being deployed in cars, aircraft  and appliances. A modern automobile contains about 50 embedded processors and about five layers of networking. So there are tremendous opportunities for graduates and I reckon that trend's going to grow to about 600 embedded processors in cars by 2018 running billions of lines of embedded software.

According to Google, the search leader gets a large number of entry level applicants for positions in its Australia and New Zealand office although Google recognizes that is a general shortage of computer science graduates.

"We're lucky enough to have a ready supply of applicants," says Rob Shilkin, head of corporate communications & public affairs Australia & New Zealand at Google. "Having said that, we recognize that we're in a fortunate position in terms of being Google and giving our engineers the opportunity to work on worldwide projects that impact millions of people.

"We're aware that there was some drop off in IT enrolments following the dot com crash. We hope that Google will be part of the Australian ecosystem that will encourage more students to undertake IT as a career choice. We're certainly working with universities to see how we can assist to help them recruit more students for their faculties."

Shilkin says the Google Australia and New Zealand office in Sydney is looking to expand and take on significant numbers of new people.

"We're looking to grow the office strongly and we will be hiring significant numbers of graduates from Australian universities in the coming years," he says."Essentially, we'll take as many bright high calibre engineers as we can find, including computer science and software engineering graduates. That's one of the main reasons we located in Australia. We think the graduates here are fantastic and the universities are putting out really good students. But we do want to make sure that there's enough graduates for the industry as a whole and we're working with universities to try to encourage more students to study IT."