Australian skills shortage continues as lack of interest and high fees keep students from the IT industry

Last year was certainly a good year for Australian IT job hunters, with reports of 'skills shortages' peppering headlines across the country. Sadly for recruiters, the situation will not change much in 2007, according to this month's Biannual Labour Market Update from APESMA (Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers, Australia).

IT professionals now net in an average salary of $85,610, with increases of up to 5 percent in the private sector, and 3.8 percent in the public sector, according to APESMA.

For Liz Tay's full article in ComputerWorld, follow the link here.
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Romanian freelancers are fast consolidating their position as the leading force in the global online marketplace for IT projects, beating their better known co-workers from India and the United States into second and third places in this highly competitive market.

Research by PhD student Ulan Radkevitch, published in the Outsourcing Journal, shows Romanian bidders to have won an impressive 18% market share of the online projects posted on e-marketplaces such as Rent A Coder, Elance and eWork. 

The secret of this success is no mystery. In the words of Rent A Coder CEO Ian Ippolito, 'Buyers have told me that they prefer Romanian coders because their experience was that Romanians were harder working, more reliable with deadlines, and didn't pester them with requests for payment before the job was completed'.

The Romanian IT industry employs some 40,000, and Romania's universities turn out an additional 8,000 IT graduates every year, combining a sound work ethic with solid technical and language skills. This has caused the major industry players to take notice, with Siemens, Alcatel and Motorola already setting up software developments centres in the country. 

For Ulan Radkevitch's article in full, follow the link here.
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And for more on the significance of Romania's rise to prominence on the IT scene, have a look at Behind GSN - The Blog.  

'Based on a number of highly visible implementations and cases, the central driver of IT-enabled business performance in 2006 will be advanced analytics in an integrated information environment. We expect to see many more companies migrate to an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), which demonstrably provides uniquely correct and detailed answers to any question, any time, anywhere'.

This is the claim made by Scott Gnau and Ron Swift of Teradata, writing in DMReview. They argue that business intelligence based on advanced analytics will form the basis of competitive strategy for a growing number of companies. Supplying this intelligence will come to form the most important value add from IT. If this turns out to be so, then there are interesting implications for all those involved in ERP.

'The growth that the enterprise resource planning (ERP) world has experienced is over. ERP vendors will buy applications to fill those gaps in their capability roadmaps and look to consolidation. Yet this will only lead to further maturity in ERP'. Underlying this shift is a move towards competing on the basis of superior business processes. In other words, there is a direct link between an insistence on better analytics and BPM, Business Process Management.

For Scott Gnau and Ron Swift's analysis in full, follow the link here .

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NSW Minister for Industrial Relations, John Della Bosca, has criticised the Commonwealth's Independent Contractors Bill at a federal senate inquiry in Canberra. Mr Della Bosca said the Independent Contractors Bill was a further attempt by the Howard Government to remove legitimate employment protections by over-riding State laws.

"Like Work Choices, the Bill tilts the employment balance too far towards the employer, encouraging sham contract arrangements that remove basic entitlements," the Minister said. "In the name of 'freeing' contract employees from the 'burden' of an award safety net, families can lose basic conditions and protections."

Employers who make staff 'independent contractors' no longer have to provide:

• · minimum rates of pay
  · annual leave
  · long service leave
  · superannuation
  · workers compensation
  · sick leave, and
  · public holidays.

"Contracting is a completely legitimate way to do business and earn a living, but it must not be used to undermine job security and transfer risk to the worker," Mr Della Bosca said.

For John Della Bosca's comments in full, follow the link here to LaborNET 

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The latest US statistics show that employment growth in IT is stronger than ever, in spite of the trend offshore through outsourcing, as in CSC's decision this week to axe 1,800 jobs and relocate to India. How is this so ? Paul McDougall of Information Week offers this explanation,

"Outsourcing proponents have long argued it's a win-win for both businesses and workers. Businesses cut costs by sending routine work offshore. Some of the money saved is then invested into more advanced projects that require higher skills, kicking off a new cycle of hiring".

"This may be what we're seeing now. The Hudson survey notes that the skills most in demand--Web services, .Net, and Java programming--are those most applicable to the buildout of cutting-edge service-oriented architectures".

For Paul McDougall's analysis in full follow the link here

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