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By Cara Garretson
(CIOZone) It's hardly surprising that a recent survey conducted by market research firm Gartner showed 64 percent of respondents don't plan to hire IT workers in the short term, citing efforts to reduce budgets. What is surprising, however, is that those who said they would hire IT talent within the next year predict having trouble finding people with the right set of skills to meet their needs.
The Gartner survey, conducted in March, asked 325 organizations based in the U.S. to answer questions regarding hiring plans and workforce retention strategies.Of the 36 percent of respondents who said they would hire between March 2009 and February 2010, many also said they are having, and expect to continue to have, trouble finding experienced IT workers in the following areas: enterprise architecture, database administration, ERP programming and analysis, project management, Internet/Web architecture, and Web application programming.
"The issue isn't about the number of candidates available for hire, but rather their quality and skill profiles," said Lily Mok, research vice president at Gartner, in a press release. "IT professionals with skills such as Oracle, SAP, Java EE, Microsoft.NET, SOA, Java and PeopleSoft are still in high demand."
Such findings show that despite hard economic times, companies still need to focus on retaining key employees whose skills are essential to ongoing projects. This can be challenging for managers who are focused instead on cutting costs and shrinking budgets to fall in line with corporate mandates.
Still, Gartner warned that corporate managers need to understand their companies' short and long term goals to avoid cutting employees now who, in the long run, they might want to hire back.
"Economic crisis is the best time to 'stress test' the endurance and agility of an organization's workforce practices. IT and HR leaders should learn from painful experiences of the past and make a conscious effort to not repeat the same mistakes," said Diane Berry, managing vice president at Gartner.
The Gartner study showed that two-thirds of the respondents don't have a formal IT workforce planning process in place to help them retain key talent today.
Despite the lack of ERP and tech talent, the survey indicated there will be an across-the-board reduction in IT salary increases for 2009 and 2010. The median salary increase for 2009 and 2010 is predicted to come in at 3 percent, Gartner says.Then again, IT workers are faring better than their counterparts in other departments. The median salary increase for workers outside the tech function is projected to come in at 2.8 percent in 2009.
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