ICT graduates in short supply

Jim O'Neill, the head of ITANZ, which represents ICT suppliers, says graduates with IT qualifications are once again in short supply after a drop in demand after the dot-com meltdown.

Wellington-based O'Neill says there was a "blossoming" of tertiary ICT course offerings from about 1998 to 2001.

"Those courses were very heavily over-subscribed. You had the phenomenon at Massey, Victoria — and probably in Auckland, too — where there were more people applying for these courses than were able to be satisfied.

"But two to three years later, when the dot-com bubble burst and the recession kicked in in the US, virtually the opposite happened. Because no one was hiring — the job market was as flat as a pancake — people stopped going into those disciplines."

O'Neill says tight economic times meant organisations put ICT projects on hold. But as conditions have improved, there is a backlog of work, creating a shortage of people with the required skills. Those particularly in demand are project managers and software developers.

Added to that, the Government is targeting ICT — along with the creative sector and biotechnology — as a growth industry; it has a goal of more than doubling the size of the ICT sector, to $10 billion, by 2012.

Bob Hodgson, professor of information engineering at Massey University, says the problem for each of the growth sectors is going to be one of lack of numbers of professionally trained people.

"It's almost as if the nation is sleepwalking to a cliff at the moment, in a number of areas," Hodgson says.

He thinks the Government has done a good job of identifying growth opportunities, but says the issue of training people to take them up has been left "hanging in the air".

With the country in a phase of infrastructure renewal and the economy growing, many people in industry are saying the limit on their expansion is a shortage of trained people, "right across the spectrum — from tradesmen through to professional engineers".

The decline in ICT course enrolments is not evenly spread across the country, Hodgson says, with Auckland numbers remaining strong. But Massey is finding some ICT courses have about a fifth of the number of enrolments of five years ago; and interest in computer science at institutions around the country is at its lowest level for 15 years.

Hodgson says the problem needs to be addressed by providing incentives, perhaps through a differential fee structure, through scholarships and through industry initiatives. He doesn't think institutions, which are already criticised for their marketing spending, can solve the situation.

"It's got to be something addressed on a national scale."