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By Cara Garretson

It's not surprising that a recent survey conducted by market research firm Gartner showed 64 percent of respondents don't plan to hire IT workers in the short term, citing efforts to reduce budgets. What is surprising, however, is that those who said they would hire IT talent within the next year predict having trouble finding people with the right set of skills to meet their needs.

The Gartner survey, conducted in March, asked 325 organizations based in the U.S. to answer questions regarding hiring plans and workforce retention strategies. Of the 36 percent of respondents who said they would hire between March 2009 and February 2010, many also said they are having, and expect to continue to have, trouble finding experienced IT workers in the following areas: enterprise architecture, database administration, ERP programming and analysis, project management, Internet/Web architecture, and Web application programming.

"The issue isn't about the number of candidates available for hire, but rather their quality and skill profiles," said Lily Mok, research vice president at Gartner, in a press release issued Tuesday. "IT professionals with skills such as Oracle, SAP, Java EE, Microsoft.NET, SOA, Java and PeopleSoft are still in high demand."

Such findings show that despite hard economic times, companies still need to focus on retaining key employees whose skills are essential to ongoing projects. This can be challenging for managers who are focused instead on cutting costs and shrinking budgets to fall in line with corporate mandates. Still, Gartner warns that CIOs need to understand their companies' short and long term goals to avoid cutting employees now who, in the long run, they will regret having let go.

"Economic crisis is the best time to 'stress test' the endurance and agility of an organization's workforce practices. IT and HR leaders should learn from painful experiences of the past and make a conscious effort to not repeat the same mistakes," said Diane Berry, managing vice president at Gartner. "Now is the time for CIOs and HR leaders to review and revise IT human capital management programs to ensure they can continuously attract and retain talent during and after this economic period."

However, the Gartner study showed that most respondents -- 66 percent -- don't have a formal IT workforce planning process in place to help them retain key talent today.

Also expected were the survey results that showed lower voluntary turnover rates than in the past. The median voluntary turnover rate with retirements dropped from 7.1 percent for the 12 month period before March 1, 2008 to 5.4 percent for the last 12 months. Gartner says this drop is a result of an overall weak job market, which discourages employees from leaving their job even if they have a poor relationship with their supervisor or aren't content with their compensation. The latter must be a growing sentiment, as the survey showed there will be an across-the-board reduction in salary increases for 2009 and 2010. The median salary increase for 2009 and 2010 is predicted to come in at 3 percent, Gartner says.

Still, IT professionals are faring better than those in other departments, which will see a median salary increase of 2.8 percent in 2009, the study showed.

Comments (2)

	1. 07-30-2009 12:44
	While the perception may be that it will be hard to find workers with the skills outlined, there are going to be few better times than now to do so. I believe part of the problem is that companies, particularly large ones, have not adapted their hiring practices to the times and been aggressive about the opportunities. For example, there are about to be a lot of Yahoo engineers on the street as a result of the Microhoo deal; how many hiring companies are going to aggressively jump on that opportunity as opposed to wait for the resumes to trickle in? Similarly, how many hiring companies will let the right candidate slip away because they aren't located in the right locale. An example of a savvy employer is Engine Yard, who just used the uncertainty of the Sun/Oracle acquisition to recruit the entire JRuby team to Engine Yard...that's a motivated company that wants the right talent. Registered

Frederick B. Kauber

	2. 08-06-2009 16:26
	Similar supply/demand issues with IT labor emerged following the post-9/11 recession. At that time, many IT workers with the types of sought-after skills in demand said they couldn't attract the attention of recruiters and hiring managers, even though they felt they had the requisite skills.    Meanwhile, hiring managers lamented that while there was no shortage of 'candidates' in the market, they did have trouble finding people with the kind of experience and personalities that best suited their organizations. I suspect the same issues are occurring now. Registered

Tom Hoffman

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