Staff retention, skills audits to solve skills shortage: IT trainer

Stan Beer
Monday, 25 June 2007 12:01

IT People - Enterprise

Promoting from within and performing regular IT skills audits are two of the best ways for companies to address and overcome the growing IT skills shortage currently threatening the Australian workplace, according to a leading trainer.

Steve Ross, general manager of Dimension Data Learning Solutions, believes not enough attention has been paid to IT workers or students in discussions involving the skills shortage issues. And little advice has been given on what the industry needs to do to counter the issue.

Mr Ross says that staff retention, internal career building and regular skills audits are the keys to address the skills shortage and prepare for future shortages.

“If you pay your staff a fair wage and reward them through training and other incentives, it costs a little more. But when you factor in the cost of re-hiring staff, retention is always the best way,” says Mr Ross.

According to Mr Ross, not enough organizations are tapping into their own talent banks when looking for good IT people.

"Look inside the organisation for talent – look for other people who aspire to work in IT," he says.
"Develop a learning and development plan for your staff which covers technical, process and people skills. This will build their career.

"Perform a skills audit – identify where the skills shortfalls are and then look to build those skills within the company."

Too few companies address the last point, according to Mr Ross.

"Companies need to retain people, but what they actually want to retain are the skills because some are very hard to replace. And even though companies perform financial audits, they never conduct skills audits," he says.

Like others involved in training and recruitment, Mr Ross predicts that process and business skills will be the areas which are most likely to experience skills shortages in the future.

"As IT has become an important business issue, companies have upped their IT budgets. As a result, companies are implementing new technologies and upgrading existing ones more frequently. Therefore we’re seeing requirements for people who need to manage change using skills such as ITIL, project management, business analysis. It will be these skills, which are involved in the process of changing technology that will be in most demand for some time to come."