• IT Systems Administrator
• Desktop Team Leader
• Head of Business Intelligence -...
• IT Manager / Systems Administrator
• CHANNEL ACCOUNT MANAGER $ 210K...

Opportunities for our ICT growth stifled by skills shortage

Peter Davidson, Information Age

11/02/2005 13:21:56

Australia faces a dilemma in the global ICT skills market: valuable opportunities to provide recognised expertise in collaborative arrangements with major offshore companies will falter unless our knowledge pool is quickly restocked.

According to ICT doyen (and Australian Information Industry Association chairman) John Price, major ICT companies in China, India and elsewhere in Asia urgently need Australian high-end skills in, project and business management to sustain their rapid growth.

But Australia must move quickly to ensure that there is a sustainable supply of the required skills to exploit these opportunities.

"We can complain as much as we like about the potential for jobs to go outside of Australia but over the next couple of decades, skills supply will become even more a global issue," he says. "Global supply is here to stay and there is no reason Australia cannot be an offshore development destination if we focus on our strengths,

"Australia is a very clever country when it comes to building software but overall we haven't been successful in commercialising that software to world markets. Part of the reason is our distance from our markets. We need to ask: Who doesn't have the international smarts in software that we have, and how can we partner with them?"

Collaboration, not skills in exile He does not advocate sending our skills offshore to be lost, but to weld strategic alliances with companies already established in China, India, the Philippines and elsewhere to provide much-needed and recognised expertise in system design, architecture, project management and general management.

Injecting Australian expertise into lower cost, high quality ICT companies overseas will provide a unique development springboard for our companies:

"It's not about their country, not about partnering to sell skills to the Indian Government or its banking system, but about leveraging opportunities to service those Indian and Chinese companies' customers around the world under collaborative alliances.

"Countries like Sri Lanka, Vietnam, China, India and others in our region have positioned themselves with ICT as their economic hope, and while they are producing high quality engineers to serve a dynamic professional market, they lack the experience and expertise in areas where Australians excel."

With global supply a reality, he says, he sees the supply of the skills needed to sustain it as a profitable interchange like any other trading pattern.

Australian companies can tap into a supply of high quality engineering skills from offshore to develop competitiveness with multinationals in global markets, the multinationals active in Asia are also well established in Australia and can leverage those local resources as they develop.

Additionally, the massive customer bases of the multinationals in India and elsewhere offer huge potential markets through strategic alliances, and the Australian software companies that need to build high quality code and get it to market fast can gain a development springboard by rolling out product at lower cost and faster - for global markets.

The great opportunity for Australia is to identify how best to collaborate with those companies to get the best solution for Australian companies.

IBM has about 20,000 staff in India, Infosys 35,000, Accenture 10,000 and other multinationals like CSC, EDS also have significant populations - and customer bases to match.

There is fertile ground for Australian involvement, he says, citing a recent visit to China for meetings with senior management and HR executives who listed project and business process management skills as high among needed capabilities.

"These executives need to find specific niche competencies and see Australian work and communication practices as flexible and more open than others. Mandarin is not a prerequisite to form collaborative arrangements.

"China, like India, does not have a shortage of highly qualified engineers - they have to be good given the competition for university places - but while they are skilled and enthusiastic, they lack experience.

"Consequently, Chinese and Indian professionals tend to move between jobs quickly to gain new skill levels and CEO's work hard to keep valued staff. This reinforces opportunities for Australian companies to provide high-end professional resources through stable partnerships to the benefit of both sides."

Australia, on the other hand, will face a dire shortage of skills, he says following the slump in the ICT sector between 2000-03 and a dwindling flow of graduates.

"If we are to take advantage of overseas opportunities to develop an industry which accounts for half of Australia's foreign trade deficit, we must move quickly to identify the particular skills we will need on a global platform.

"There will come a sudden wake-up call like the one Sydney Water had when it finally realised its resources were dangerously low, and it will take a three- to five-year cycle to start to bolster the ranks of ICT professionals."

While he applauds the efforts of the ACS Foundation in particular to support the development of practitioners with skills to meet identified gaps in our knowledge and skills base, more must be done to encourage universities to make the appreciation and application of ICT a core subject in all disciplines.

"Whether in architecture, hospitality, medicine or whatever, IT systems utilisation should be a fundamental in any degree course so professionals know how databases, supply chain, ERP, risk and disaster recovery management work to support and advance their organisations, and add to their country's international credentials.

"The ACS Foundation has awarded 150 scholarships worth $4.5m since its inception a few years ago, totally focused on specific outcomes rather than generic qualifications like systems development. Co-op schemes like those run by RMIT and the UNSW, supported by industry, also equip graduates with immediately required qualifications and workplace experience.

"The Foundation, and focused university courses like these, must be given greater support, and soon.

"In debates with government and industry, ICT must work to enunciate the broader benefits of technologies and practices which underpin almost every aspect of private and business life. Particularly, parents must be convinced that ICT is a valuable career path for their children."

"ICT is too far down our economic food chain in the eyes of many Australians who influence career decisions, whereas the Asian countries I have mentioned have recognised that information technology and communications are the primary drivers of rapidly growing economies.

"Here, ICT is misunderstood as a career of choice. ICT careers are a springboard for broader managerial positions as well as specialisation into industry specific functions. The scope in careers for those who can articulate business requirements to technical staff is huge.

"Unfortunately ICT careers are seen by many as the place for 'screen bound techies' which simple isn't true."

He speaks from 10 years' experience as chair of the AIIA's education and training forum, a post he held until taking leadership of the association three years ago, and now also with area responsibility for Delhi-based training and systems management organisation NIIT.

With learning services in 33 countries, NIIT produces more than 350,000 ICT-qualified graduates a year. The leveraging of skilled graduates created their IT Services business which now has operations in the US, Europe and Asia including Australia . NIIT specialises in banking and insurance, transportation and retail with a who's who of international customers.

The Australian business has a blend of Australian and Indian staff and all current work is completed on shore. The focus here , interestingly enough, is collaboration with Australian service and ICT product companies.

NIIT, with level 5 Capability Maturity Model (CMM) accreditation in systems development and level 3 in PCMM (human resources), is indicative of the standard of Indian companies like Infosys and others.

"Quality assurance there is no longer a question; these are not sweatshops but highly professional operations which look and feel like major corporations in the Western world. There should be an exchange of professionals between Australia and India to appreciate the rigour that goes into their development work, just as they can understand the expertise that Australians can bring to a global market."