In this week's edition of news for IT pros, insight into the IT talent shortage, and what companies are doing about it.
Hard to find IT talent? Look outside of IT
Talent war. Skills gaps. Whatever you call it, IT organizations across industries are struggling to find, recruit, and keep highly skilled technology professionals to meet some of the most pressing business challenges today. According to the CIO Executive Council’s (CEC) 2016 IT Talent Assessment Survey, 83 percent of IT leaders have open positions to fill over the next six months, yet 69 percent cite a lack of qualified applicants in the talent pool as a major challenge.
While this is bad news for leaders with gaps to fill, IT professionals are reaping the rewards of a stable and well-compensated career path. According to Computerworld's 2016 IT Salary Survey, 73 percent of security pros believe that the potential for salary advancement in their career is more promising than most other career paths. Indeed, as Amy Bennett reports for CSO, the survey also showed that “information security manager is the hottest job in IT, boasting the biggest increase in average total compensation (up 6.4 percent from 2015 to 2016).”
In her article, Bennett goes on to point out the IT talent shortage and talent poaching as major challenges facing the IT industry, reporting that “73.9 percent of security pros (compared to 60.7 percent of all IT pros) said they had been approached by a hiring organization or headhunter about job opportunities.”
Acknowledging the increased demand for IT talent across all industries as technology is embedded into daily workflows, Jean Martin writes in The Washington Post, “Unfortunately, traditional IT recruiting focuses on sourcing candidates with four-year technology degrees and, in doing so, eliminates many otherwise qualified candidates from consideration.” She argues that if companies want to “maintain a competitive advantage in the IT job market, employers must plan for, attract, assess and develop candidates from nontraditional talent pools.”
More news for CIOs
'The cognitive enterprise' is the CIO's next frontier [SearchCIO]
Is the CIO a shoo-in for the chief digital officer role? [TechTarget]
The risks and rewards of shadow IT [CIO Dive]
