The lack of skilled IT workers is hurting the deployment of emerging technology, according to a new survey from Gartner. In areas from cloud to cybersecurity, this crisis is expected to last for years to come.
This is a time of uncertainty for everyone in every industry, about job prospects and job security – among many other things. Will people in IT who play their cards right avoid the worst of the impacts on the economy? It may depend on your specialty.
“In IT right now, if it’s value-based and companies can make money off of it, I think salaries will go up – one of the few areas where salaries will be going up,” says Jay A. Block, a career coach, author, and coach to other career coaches.
What are the eight telling statistics on jobs and hiring during the pandemic?
“Given these uncertain times, and with all of the remote work taking place, information security talent at all levels will continue to be in high demand for the foreseeable future,” Kelly Doyle, managing director, Heller Search Associates, an executive search firm that specializes in CIOs and other IT leaders, told us recently.
You don’t have to be an economist to forecast that the current crisis is accelerating a transition from face-to-face to remote interaction, mediated by Zoom and other technologies, Block says, so naturally, technologists who position themselves well should prosper.
Of course, he adds, “that’s just my opinion.” Let’s delve into some recent data points:
Art Zeile, CEO of Dice parent company DHI Group, Inc., provided additional commentary via email, saying he was confident the trends from the first three months of the year are still holding up in May: “Over the past several weeks, we’ve seen a stable number of tech job postings, roughly in line with the trailing twelve-month average and similar to what other online recruiting sites have reported, as enterprises look to accelerate the use of technology in their business. Now more than ever, businesses realize they need an online business model, a way of delivering services without being face-to-face, and a way to manage their remote employees effectively.”
As FastCompany points out, “Some of the findings may surprise you: For instance, the salary reductions are not just hitting top executives and their fat bonuses. At last count, 61 percent of the affected companies applied pay reductions to the base salaries of senior managers who make less than top-tier executives, the Conference Board says. It adds that 11 percent of all companies in the index announced base pay cuts between March 1 and April 24.”
Of the companies cutting salaries and bonuses, 6.6 percent are in information technology — although some, like Expedia, are also travel and hospitality companies.
Some tech firms are asking employees to help them stay solvent by switching more of their compensation from cash to stock.
In the context of the overall tech job market, those impacts have been relatively minor, Dice's Zeile says – largely confined to those companies whose technologies tied to sectors of the economy that have been directly affected by stay-at-home orders. He points to Lyft reducing executive pay by 20-30 percent.
The need was also reflected in postings for other job titles, including cybersecurity analyst (+23 percent), cybersecurity specialist (+21 percent), cybersecurity consultant (+11 percent), cybersecurity architect (+11 percent), and cybersecurity manager (+8 percent).
When we talked to IT recruiters in April about IT roles that were fading in importance, four came up frequently: system administrators, project managers, quality assurance engineers, and back-end and front-end engineers (as opposed to full-stack developers.)
As for IT roles with plenty of upside for the future, recruiters cited product managers, security professionals, analytics pros, and data scientists and engineers.
The way Zeile sees it, the trend is for companies to double down on essentials like the security, stability, and scalability of corporate infrastructure over creating a prettier website or more elaborate apps. In other words, they are addressing the technology needs they see as absolutely essential and putting other things on hold.
Even if technologists may be insulated from the worst of the economic trends, Block says they will need to be able to articulate the value they offer to potential employers. “Those can come up with a message that says ‘I can make you money or save you money’ will get hired. Those who can’t, won’t.”
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