Aging workers, automation portend IT hiring problems

27.03.2006
Squeezed by two seemingly contradictory trends that are slowly draining IT operations of senior employees and making it harder to hire replacements: an aging workforce and increasing automation.

That was the finding of a survey of 179 IT managers conducted earlier this year by AFCOM, an association of data center managers. The results were released last week.

Nearly half of the survey respondents said it takes at least three months to fill senior-level technical and management positions, while 38 percent reported that their data centers employ fewer workers than they did five years ago.

To address the implications of such trends, data center executives need to train and promote workers to senior positions so that "when you go to hire, you are not trying to hire the highest-level positions," said Leonard Eckhaus, founder of Orange, California-based AFCOM.

The association estimates that the pool of available senior-level data center workers will decline by 45 percent by 2015. "It's already more difficult than ever to fill open positions in the data center," Eckhaus said.

Retirement trend