Infrastructure jobs go begging while universities vacillate: IT trainer

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 13 June 2007 19:24

IT People - Enterprise

A senior IT trainer believes universities are not turning out IT graduates with the skills necessary to fill a plethora of unfilled entry level infrastructure roles currently on offer throughout Australia.

Cassandra Ashworth, the national manager of the Express IT program at IT training company Excom, which trains and places people for entry level infrastructure roles, says the company is unable to fill all the available positions.

"In terms of the entry level market, there is an absolute truckload of opportunities," says Ms Ashworth. "We have more than 200 vacancies nationally that can't be filled and we're waiting for our next lot of graduates to come through to facilitate employment. A lot of the time our students are now placed before they graduate and the average placement time for candidates nationally is currently 3.2 weeks.

"The market is very bouyant. We're seeing a lot of activity from a project perspective  with companies still rolling out Windows XP and Office 2003. It's still too early at this stage for them to even look at Vista. Organizations, including government, are spending a lot of money on IT infrastructure."

According to Ms Ashworth, a high proportion of students undertaking the three month Express IT program at Excom are graduates, indicating a failure of universities to address the needs of the entry level employment market.

"About 42% of the students that pursue our program have got a degree or diploma in IT from university or a TAFE college and have been unsuccessful in securing employment," Ms Ashworth says.

"The universities are simply not keeping up with the times. They can't update their competencies quickly enough because there's virtually something new coming out every year."

According to Ms Ashworth, entry level IT graduates who want to get into development would do well to also gain skills in networking as a sort of insurance policy.

"For those that wish to pursue a career in development, we try to cross train them because when the industry takes a dive the area that takes the biggest impact is the development side. When companies decide to put the brakes on spending it going to be on further developing their systems but they're always going to need someone to manage their infrastructure."