IT graduates harder to find says CSC boss

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 12 June 2007 15:57

IT People - Enterprise

As the demand for IT graduates starts to climb and enrolments into IT courses continues to drop, one of Australia's largest employers of IT people is finding it tougher to stay too picky. According to Mike Shove, CEO of IT services provider CSC Australia, the company now takes on 40% more graduates than it did two years ago but gets just over half the number of applicants.

"Demand for graduates is higher than it was two years ago," says Mr Shove. "We've had a program running for almost four years and four years ago we would have had 1300 applications for 50 jobs and we had our pick of the kids. Now there's more and more demand, we add about 70 a year and get about 700 applications."

The graduate shortage is not surprising given that in 2001 Australian resident IT student enrolments numbered 17,058, while in 2005 new enrolments were down to 9,277.

According to Luke Singleton, director of the technology division of ASX listed recruiter Ambition, demand for graduates is as high as it's been for some time.

"We're involved in some of the junior end of the market so we see a number of entry level positions," says Mr Singleton. "We're finding that within the commercial sector there is quite a strong demand for graduates."

Mr Singleton says that there are simply not enough local IT graduates coming out of universities to fill the roles.

In fact, about 55% of all IT students at Australian universities are full fee paying foreign students, of which a fair proportion (about 3600 foreign graduates in 2005-06) gets permanent resident visas once they graduate.

The looming local IT graduate shortage has prompted the Federal Government to relax the migration laws for foreign students but not everyone is happy with the resulting scenario. Migration and labour market analyst Bob Kinnaird is a vocal critic of a new class of visa due to be made available to foreign IT students.

"The Federal govt has changed the migration rules for foreign students studying IT here. From 1 September 2007, foreign students graduating from IT courses can stay and work in Australia on a new temporary work visa," says Mr Kinnaird.

"The new visa, visa subclass 485, was announced over Easter time. It gives foreign graduates unrestricted work rights in Australia for up to 18 months after graduating. If they can show they have acquired 12 months 'professional level' work experience in IT in that time, they will then be eligible for a PR (permanent resident) visa."

Mr Kinnaird says it is still too early to determine the extent of the IT graduate shortage and he believes the implementation of the new 485 visa could put undue pressure on the local IT graduate market.
 
"The foreign graduates do not have to be sponsored by an employer (unlike the 457 visa) and there is no minimum salary attached to the visa, also unlike the 457 visa. They just have to have minimum English at IELTS 6 level. These grads will therefore be adding to IT graduate supply and competing with Australian IT grads, with the promise of permanent residence in Australia if they can clock up the 12 months. In my opinion, that’s an incentive for foreign grads to undercut IT graduate wages in order to get the job and then PR – just like the H-1B visa in the US."

"In 2006, according to figures from the Graduate Destination Surveys  of the Graduate Careers Council of Aust, 21% of IT graduates could not find full-time employment within 4 months of graduating," says Mr Kinnaird. "That compares with an 18% national average and 14% for accounting graduates. We won't know what the current figures are until the end of 2007."

The upswing in demand for IT workers however may well see IT graduates getting snapped up much quicker for the remainder of 2007 than last year. Ambition's Luke Singleton doesn't believe that supply will exceed demand anytime soon.

"At the moment there is definitely a shortage of graduates coming through the university system and companies are having to pay more than they used to for IT graduates because the increased demand," he says. "At the moment there are just not enough people and that's why IT training companies are spending a lot more on their advertising because there is demand at that junior level."