Public sector faces IT skills shortage

A new research study from specialist IT recruiters Greythorn has highlighted a looming skills shortage crisis across the public sector. Massive projects such as 2003ís 10-year, 4bn Defence Information Infrastructure project and the NHS National Programme for IT have meant no shortage of jobs in recent years, and analysts, technical architects and consultants alike have been only too happy to make the move from private to public sector considering the scarcity of large-scale projects in commerce and industry in the early 2000s. However, the recent IT boom in both commerce and industry and financial services has meant a growth in movement of senior specialists from government projects back to these better-paid private sector positions.

ìSome of the very largest projects have attracted extremely talented IT specialists from the private sector, because of their high profile and the technical challenges involved,î says Mark Verghese, director of Greythorn, ìHowever the bad publicity about overspends has meant that there is now increasing pressure from the government to keep project costs down and thatís likely to mean less interesting work and reduced rates of pay, which in turn will make the whole arena less attractive to the best people.î

However Satnam Brar, managing director of ERP recruitment specialists Maximus, says that the situation is not quite so simple in the Enterprise Resource Planning market. ìWhile the public sector is certainly recruiting support staff and analysts directly, the juiciest consulting roles are now firmly in the hands of the large integrators, thanks to the growing trend towards outsourcing. What the integrators look for, however, are not pure public sector specialists, but ëmulti-facersí who can operate just as well in both the public and private arenas, and the majority of these are not ex-civil servants but the kind of people who have spent most of their working lives to date in commerce, industry or financial services. The ëcavalryí are therefore always on call for the public sector ñ it just goes to show how much the market has changed, because in the 1990s IT professionals with these types of background would have been decidedly sniffy about the idea of working in the public sector.î