Skills shortage puts government plans in jeopardy

The UK government's call for everyone to be on the internet by 2005 is floundering under a severe shortage of skilled networking professionals.

E-envoy Alex Allan has called for volunteers to share their expertise with the wider community as part of a drive to make the UK a leader in ebusiness. But demand for knowledge of Unix-related languages such as Linux and local and wide area networking (Wan) skills, far outstrips supply.

Peter Crowcombe, an analyst at Infonetics Research, said: "The skills crisis is in selective areas, with security expertise lacking in particular. The market is going headlong in one direction. The pace of ebusiness development has been extremely fast and getting up to speed in terms of people with security skills has been slower."

Helen Ware, permanent recruitment manager at Elan Computing, said: "There is a shortage of security expertise, but skills on the Wan side are particularly lacking. Companies tell us they are having difficulty finding voice and data people, and professionals with SDH [synchronous digital hierarchy] expertise." SDH is a global standard for digital transmission that is used in core communication networks over which broadband, video, data and voice services run.

Paul Butler, a consultant at Apex Computer Recruitment, added that people with good Cisco skills, for example, were extremely rare. "Financially, Cisco expertise is the best way into networking - it can't train people fast enough," he claimed.

But despite the current onus on richer companies to invest in staff training and new skills development, Butler claims: "They often look to smaller companies to train people up for them."

Ware attests, however: "No-one could have predicted the massive growth in the market. Larger companies genuinely realise that training is key to attracting staff and keeping them."

Running in-house specialist training courses is seen as the most appropriate response to such skills shortages, not least because there is an evident misalliance between what expertise IT managers need and what universities and colleges are producing.

Experience over qualifications
"Universities can only go so far," said Crowcombe. "They can lay a foundation, but networking professionals need real-world experience. The larger companies have a responsibility to put something back into the industry, if only for their own interests. They need to focus on a strategy to maintain a strong skills base. The problem is, as soon as you train someone up, they become valuable and more marketable - then they are likely to move on."

But he believes that the skills gap between the UK and the US is not as large as is generally thought, although many networking professionals have deserted their homeland for Silicon Valley.

"We are closing the gap, but the US tends to be more forward thinking than us. They move ahead of the market and anticipate better. We need accelerated programmes to deal with the skills shortage, but the pace of change is restricted in the UK. The benefit for us is that people who go to work in America will return with new skills and attitudes," he said.

But the limited number of people in the UK who are suitably qualified and highly experienced in these areas mean they are often beyond the price range of the general market. Rich companies snap up sought-after networking specialists, poaching them from smaller organisations and the public sector, neither of which has the resources to keep them.

As a result, trained professionals can now afford to be more selective about the jobs they take and the fees they command, with high staff turnover creating a vacuum that is hard to fill in the present market.

"Retaining permanent staff is a real concern for IT managers," said Crowcombe. "Companies need to pay very well to keep hold of valuable employees."

This means companies that cannot offer substantial financial rewards find that their best staff often begin to move into the potentially more lucrative world of contracting.

"Contracting is booming at the moment," said Butler. "There is a skills shortage in that area as well, which really says something."

Ware added: "People will go where the good projects are. It is a transient market and smaller companies may suffer."