AIIA’s Chief Executive Officer, Rob Durie, explores how the ICT industry can capture the imaginations of young people to ensure it has the necessary skills for the future.

There has been a lot of talk in recent months about whether or not there is an ICT skills crisis. I confess I am not very comfortable with the terms ‘skills shortage’ and ‘skills crisis’. I do not find the debate constructive. It also gives me a strong feeling of déjà vu. These words can be useful to initiate urgent action. But the lesson of the past is they do not serve us well in setting up structures and programs to move the skills issue forward.

Reflecting on our recent history, the Information Industries Education and Skills Foundation comes to mind. In 1988, as part of John Button’s Information Industries Strategy, this foundation was established to deal with the perceived skills crisis at that time. The foundation was wound up after 3-4 years, saying its work was done. It wasn't really, but the 1991 recession caused significant job cutbacks in the industry for the first time. It seemed inappropriate to promote ICT careers and education at a time when major vendors were retrenching 25 per cent or more of their Australian staff.

Moving on a few years, the dot.com boom and Y2K led to projections of shortages of 30,000 ICT professionals. Based on these projections, we set up the Skills Hub. The dot.com crash and the sluggish performance of the industry in the early 2000s, together with the resultant slump in employment, meant a loss of support for the Hub, which closed last year.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the present situation. Is there a shortage or not? Is there too much immigration or not enough? Are migrants taking jobs from Australians? Are the skills of migrants below par? Is offshoring causing unemployment or are we winning more than our fair share of global projects?

Instead of thinking ‘crisis’, we should think more constructively. We should think about it as a long-term and ongoing task to ensure we have the necessary skills for the future; skills for the growth and development of our industry and skills for the application of ICT right across our economy – in government, business and the community.

As we know, ICT is becoming more pervasive and more embedded in every aspect of human activity. So, we are going to need more people with ICT skills, not fewer. We also need to think about a much broader range of skills, not just programming, but business analysis, sales and marketing project management to name just a few examples.

So this is not just an issue for our industry; it is an issue and a challenge for the economy and Australian society as a whole.

And we are not the only industry faced with this challenge. The federal government is predicting that in the next five years, due primarily to demographic changes, Australia faces a potential shortfall of 195,000 workers. Right now, unemployment is at a 29 year low. With the continued growth of the economy and our ageing population, we are engaged in a war for talent.

The ongoing task of getting the skills we need for our industry encompasses a wide variety of issues, including:

• Encouraging the best young people to consider ICT as a career,
• Working with government and education providers to ensure students are getting high quality relevant education at all levels - schools, vocational training institutions and universities,
• Providing ongoing training and skill development for those already in the ICT workforce,
• Providing a flexible and attractive workplace so we can recruit and retain the best people, and
• Diversifying the ICT workforce, particularly attracting women and mature age workers.

While there a host of other issues to consider, if I had to choose just one issue to tackle, it would be the challenge of making ICT more attractive as a career. We must get the best young people to consider a career in ICT. We, who work in and for the industry, are passionate about ICT and we find it hard to understand why others don’t intuitively share our passion. We know that many young people are turned off careers in ICT. “It is for nerds”, or “it is for blokes” or “it’s boring, you just sit in front of a computer screen all day,” are common misconceptions we hear from young people.

There have been numerous reports on this issue, but not a lot of concerted action. And yet, when they are asked what they are looking for in a career, young people say they are looking for fun, variety, security, interaction with others, helping others, expressing their creativity and the opportunity to travel.

It sounds like they are describing our industry!

So, to put the problem simply, we face an overall and growing skill shortage, demand for people with skills relevant to ICT will increase but enrolments in ICT related courses are falling because young people do not see careers in ICT as attractive.

As an industry, we need to step up to the challenge. We need to be out there with the other industries and professions fighting for our fair share of talent.

As one of my industry colleagues put it “what are we really doing to win the hearts and minds of young kids and their parents?”

It should be relatively easy for us to capture the imaginations of Generation Y and X people. They are more familiar with technology than we are. We have a great story to tell. ICT is improving the lives of people all over the world: in the way we work and play; it is driving breakthroughs in health research; it enabled us to map the human genome. The list is endless.

But we can only achieve this if we all – government, industry, suppliers, customers and professionals – work together. We have a golden opportunity to make a difference. We mustn’t waste it.

AIIA has only recently launched a new program - Take IT On - at the National ICT Skills Summit. Developed by the Queensland branch of AIIA, ‘Take IT On is designed to encourage secondary school students from years 8 to 10 to explore the wide range of exciting global career opportunities in the ICT industry.

Take IT On will give secondary students the opportunities to meet directly with a wide range of ICT professionals and hear first hand why they love their jobs and in doing so, find out why ICT is an exciting, rewarding industry in which to be involved.

Take IT On has also been developed to illustrate to parents - through their children and the collateral - that the ICT industry is a strong, growing and economically sound industry that offers considerable scope and opportunity for their children.

A pilot program will be held for 50 students in Queensland during the second half of the 2006 school year. AIIA aims to host the program for 1,000 students throughout the 2007 school year.

To find out more about Take IT On – Great Careers for Great People in Information Technology, visit www.aiia.com.au.

Rob Durie
Chief Executive Officer
Australian Information Industry Association

To read about AIIA’s response to the ICT Skills Foresighting Working Group’s report, Building Australian ICT Skills, released on 21 June,
click here.

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