Only three per cent of UK businesses plan to replace IT staff to fill the skills gap left by the recession, according to a recent survey of UK IT managers commissioned by Esteem Systems.
As the UK starts to see signs of recovery, 64 per cent of businesses and organisations admitted they will be investing in IT to help drive business forward. Just six per cent said they would take a ‘wait and see’ approach to the recovery.
The research also revealed that due to the demand for more flexible solutions to solve the skills shortage resulting from the recession, IT managed services are becoming a growth area.
Alastair Kitching, Chief Operating Officer at Esteem Systems, says, “Our survey showed that businesses are understandably being cautious with regards to investing in recruitment, despite the fact that we’re coming out of recession. However, 95 per cent of the businesses we questioned believe it’s vitally important to continue to invest in IT solutions, with 61 per cent identifying managed services as a preferred approach.
“Businesses are clearly putting IT at the heart of their plan for recovery, and managed systems are increasingly being seen as the best vehicle to deliver that recovery in IT. This is because the current climate may still be too unstable to commit to recruiting more staff, and there is also a real need to relieve the pressure on overstretched IT departments.”
GAC UK, part of the GAC Group, a global shipping, logistics and marine services provider, participated in the survey and said managed services was the right solution because it provided the skills they needed at the time.
A spokesman says, “One of the bonuses of using managed services is that certain skill sets are more readily available to me at the time I need them, rather than employing a number of IT staff direct.”
DC Thomson, the Scottish-based publisher, prefers to use managed services for non-core business applications and systems enabling it to focus IT resources on delivering value-added services to the company.
A spokesman says: “We outsourced those areas for which we had no real depth of experience, as we wanted to concentrate on core competencies.”
Kitching concludes, “Skills that have been lost due to the cuts made over the past 12 to 18 months are more easily replaced by buying-in that expertise. It may be that businesses still fear a double dip recession could be around the corner and feel that a managed service is a more flexible solution at this time.”
