Like most of today’s businesses, your operation is likely to be heavily reliant on IT and communications services. Yet in the tight labour market, you might also be finding that access to some IT skills is becoming increasingly difficult. If so, what are the options, and to what extent can outsourcing help?
Thanks to sustained economic growth and near full employment, it’s no surprise that recruiting and retaining qualified professional staff in Australia is becoming a difficult task.
This is especially the case when it comes to specialised vocations, and the strong demand for IT skills in particular is making for a tight market.
In fact, the Skills in Demand List released by the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations confirms what many employers are experiencing.
In the IT sector, skills that the department declares to be in state-wide shortage across New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland include everything from general application development and software engineering, to network security, CRM/ERM and database management.
Significantly, the latest labour market profile on the industry shows that in one-year vacancies rose by 25 percent.
So what does this mean for your business? Well for one thing, this demand is driving up IT salaries, adding to the cost of recruiting and retaining IT staff.
There are a number of options SMEs can look at to tackle this problem. One option is to take advantage of skilled migration. While employers are able to sponsor overseas workers on temporary or permanent visas, by far the most common case is ‘independent migration’, where skilled IT workers move to Australia off their own bat and are then employed. If you’re considering this in the IT sector, be aware that there are specific minimum salary requirements for certain positions and skills. Helpfully, however, most of the paperwork hassles for employers have now been removed via options for electronic lodgement.
Another possible strategy in the face of the skills shortage is to offer training and education opportunities to current staff. While some skills are highly specialised and do require high levels of aptitude and experience to get right, the good news is that many basic IT skills can be learnt by existing members of your IT team, deepening the overall wealth of knowledge in your business. The drawback here, though, is that the process can’t be hurried (no one can be made an expert overnight) and by skilling up your existing staff to take on additional workload, you run the risk of overstretching an already busy and under resourced team.
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Another important strategy is employee retention (after all, an IT employee who stays with your business is one who doesn’t need to be replaced). This is especially important in today’s competitive employment market as organisational knowledge, especially in the IT sphere, can be difficult to retain and without good strategies in place, they are often in danger of walking out the door. Everyone has a preference for the type of environment in which they want to work and, when it comes to retaining IT staff, creating a functioning environment, offering reward for effort, and establishing charters such as Employee Value Propositions to ensure staff are aligned to corporate values, are a good start.
The tight market, however, may mean that even satisfied employees can be tempted to switch organisations, taking their skills and project knowledge with them.
This is one problem that outsourcing allows companies to avoid. Whether it’s standard network services, IT support or a specialised application development, they can rely on an outsourcer to have the depth of skills and industry knowledge required to provide a continuum of support.
Furthermore, as access to new technologies and the skills to implement them continues to be one of the on-going demands placed by IT on companies looking to bolster their market position, outsourcing can ensure that companies keep pace with IT trends.
Outsourcing can also help businesses to keep a lid on overheads and capital expenditures, while also saving on the cost of researching and implementing IT systems in-house. In the current skills shortage, it’s a great way to counter rising salaries while ensuring your IT platform stays both functioning and up to date.
Turning to an outsourcer, however, is something that often doesn’t happen due to worries about losing control. In today’s market, this is outsourcing’s biggest perceived risk; that the company becomes locked-in to one provider, and has less of a say in its IT priorities.
Good outsourcers, though, will properly document systems and use industry best practice, making moves to other providers—for whatever reason—less difficult.
They’ll also work in close consultation with their clients, ensuring that they fully understand their client’s business and are able to move forward in partnership.
In a tough market for IT skills, where in-house knowledge is less easily acquired and retained, outsourcing IT&T is becoming a successful strategy for many organisations. And with IT now the driving force behind many competitive approaches to market, your business—with advice from the right outsourcer—could even seize a few opportunities that you weren’t aware were up for grabs.
* David Stevens is managing director of IT&T company, Brennan (www.brennanit.com.au ).
