Demand for approximately 1.6 million U.S.-based IT workers this year will create a shortfall of 840,000 between available jobs and skilled professionals to fill them. In a total IT work force of roughly 10 million, the Information Technology Association of America says, the nation's growing appetite for technical talent will translate to roughly one empty cubicle for every 12 positions.
The government sector was not a part of this landmark survey. But it is certainly not immune to the employment problems a red-hot, high- tech labor market is likely to create. Some of the most-wanted public sector employees today are network engineers, network administrators, project managers and database analysts. These positions, says Ohio CIO Greg Jackson, represent the core of practically every state and local government IT initiative currently on the drawing board. Projects include everything from back-office payroll systems, to crime-busting GIS, to splashy new Web sites with jazzy search tools, such as Ohio's job recruitment center or Utah's online adoption match.
"After Y2K, there was an expectation that government IT hiring would return to normal," says Jackson, who currently is waiting to fill 60 technology vacancies in locations across the state from Cleveland to Dayton. The reality of the situation is that the private sector's stampede to an electronic business model and the public sector's clamoring for integrated systems and Internet visibility is creating a different kind of brain drain at the outset of the new millennium. The bottom line for government: the IT job crunch is far from over and is probably going to get much worse.
Ohio is in a particularly tight position, according to high-tech headhunters at RCI Consulting of Menlo Park, California, which collects hiring forecasts from 1,400 chief information officers across a variety of industries. But even in the prairies of Kansas, Secretary of Administration Dan Stanley is feeling the pinch. The Y2K crisis spurred Kansas to develop an aggressive recruitment and retention plan in order to stem a turnover rate among experienced computer programmers that had been as high as 33 percent a year. The state's award-winning program offers bonuses to IT staff working on critical projects, having mission critical skills or willing to take courses to obtain key skills. Over the past three years, the state has paid out premiums averaging about $6,300 to more than 500 individuals, and that has helped push the high-tech turnover down to a manageable 7 percent.
In recent months, Kansas' IT recruitment has shifted away from veteran mainframe programmers to younger workers with resumes containing an alphabet soup of credentials with acronyms or names such as CCSE, Java and Active X. For these newly minted computer-school grads, the old attractions of government service--security and longevity--mean very little in the face of stock options, high five- figure salaries and the chance to be in a glamorous Internet start-up. "There is no way we can compete against the private sector financially," says Stanley. Instead, Kansas is pitching entry-level techies with jobs that will build their resumes, teach them new skills and give them broad-based experience they won't get as a novice on a corporate help desk or in network technical support.
Flexible work arrangements are three other watchwords that are slowly creeping into the lexicon of government personnel managers looking for incentives to attract high-tech-talented individuals willing to trade private-sector pay for work- and home-life balance. John Corbett, Arizona's telework programs administrator, is now arguing a business case to IT managers about a 10-year-old Arizona telecommuting program that was initially conceived to combat traffic gridlock and air pollution surrounding metropolitan Phoenix. By allowing networking professionals to manage the state's burgeoning computer infrastructure from the comforts of their own home office, Corbett says Arizona could reduce IT turnover and save the state millions in recruitment and retraining costs to boot.
But getting and keeping software and hardware engineers on the public payroll will probably be only one part of the solution. Arizona is also looking at IT management partnerships with sister agencies and Web-based outsourcing with third parties in the private sector. Ohio's Jackson has advised managers to take a hard look at short-term contracting for project-based work of limited duration. He is also taking steps to pare down the state's cumbersome six-week hiring process, during which time prospective employees are too often snagged up by somebody else.
"We're currently assessing just exactly what all the issues are," says Jackson. He'd better not take too long or there won't be any high-tech workers left.
