According to Challenger,
Gray, and Christmas, the global outplacement firm that tracks daily job cut announcements,
the IT sector has lost 180,000 jobs in 2008. Electronics, telecom, and
computer industries are in the worst shape since 2003.
Sun Microsystems,
Applied Materials, National Semiconductor, Cisco Systems, Qualcomm, and Nokia
are among those who have announced, or are expected to announce, major layoffs.
In light of this news,
many people are up in arms about companies like Dell and Citibank sending their
information technology offshore to places like India. But according to the 2008
IT Trends Survey by the Society of Information Management, the off-shoring
of IT by U.S. firms has actually declined for two straight years. Even
though planners are set to increase foreign-based IT, it represents just five
percent of their budgets for 2009.1
The reason is that CIOs
are still having trouble finding enough domestic IT workers with the
right skills to fill the open positions that they are keeping in-house.
According to TechRepublic, this means that we are facing a serious
shortage of IT workers in the years ahead. That may not matter so much at this
moment, when companies are laying people off, but it will matter when
they attempt to gear up again as the economy recovers. While companies like
Google, Intel, and Sun Microsystems are still attracting enough top-notch IT
workers, traditional companies are already struggling to find good people.2
It’s only getting worse
as Baby Boomers retire. There simply aren’t enough new graduates in math and
science to fill the vacancies in U.S. tech jobs.
There has been a lot of
debate — especially on the Internet — about whether or not the IT shortage is
real. Among those who argue that we are facing a shortage is Justin Heet, a
research fellow at the Hudson Institute, who warns that by 2011, when Baby
Boomers are expected to begin retiring en masse, we will begin to see a
tightening labor market, which will go on to...
