Although every year thousands of graduates enter the IT workforce, employers constantly struggle to find the right candidate, noted Zoe Sullivan, consultant for IT & telecommunication at recruitment firm Hudson.
"The mismatch between the demand and supply of IT professionals in Hong Kong is quite high," she said. "On a scale of one to five, the mismatch in Hong Kong is about level three."
With minimal headcounts supporting growing businesses, most enterprises in Asia respond to changes with limited resources. As a result, IT candidates need both hard technical skills and soft communications skills--a blend that's far from common.
"The shortage of IT professionals is a known fact within the industry," said Sunny Lee, president of Hong Kong Computer Society (HKCS). "Employers face a shortage of qualified IT staff because of the mismatch between staff competency and employers' requirements."
Training mismatch
One of the major problems, said Richard Stagg, owner of information security consultancy Handshake Networking, is finding graduates with skills other than software development--particularly network administration.
Stagg said he has read over 300 technical staff CVs over the last year and said that local universities' curricula overemphasize programs development while neglecting areas like network administration.
"There's a belief among universities that network administration in an infrastructure job, like people digging holes and roads, so students never get instruction in this area," he said. "But it's actually a very advanced field and a fast-growing one within IT, because it's the most difficult to outsource."
Local universities are creating too many developers, who will have problems finding high-salaried jobs when they graduate. "You don't have to go all the way to India, there are some fine developers just across the border at Guangdong," he said, "and they will work for one tenth of the local wages."
According to City University's Student Development Services, only 35.5 percent of the 2004 graduates with a BEng IT found a job in the relevant industry. The percentages were even lower among graduates of BEng Comp Eng (25 percent) and Bachelor of Science in IT (14.3 percent), though the BSc CS graduates seems to have better luck: 79.7 percent got a job in the relevant industry.
Ivory tower vs real world
Matthew Lee, associate dean, faculty of business at City University Hong Kong, agreed that local university curricula are conservative and research-focused. While tertiary education focuses on the technical aspect of IT, most employers are looking for IT graduates to support their businesses.
"Hong Kong is an application market, rather than a development market," he said. "Unfortunately, science and engineering graduates with business knowledge are rare."
But universities also have their concerns, said Lee. "Research remains a core part for any university," he said. "We are not a vocational training school and research projects are important to uphold our academic rankings."
Stagg said network administration also has lots of research opportunities. The potential lies particularly in the area for building high-end switches, firewalls or unified threat management devices.
"You are speaking with someone with 15 years of network administration experience, this area does get pretty complicated," he said. "There's lots of potential for research, but you still need to first understand the (network) requirements and you're not going to know them by learning how to program Java."
Turning overseas for help
As the head of information technology at Towngas, Lee said technical skills and experience to handle large scale enterprise projects are deficient among local IT workforce. As one of the local IT employers, Towngas has an IT team of 70 people.
"Many middle-management staff have no experience managing in an enterprise-scale project," he said. "There are fewer large-scale IT projects available because enterprises see them as risky investments with a long development time. Besides, with more packaged software and offshore outsourcing available, IT staff is having fewer opportunities to manage large scale projects."
"Employers are struggling to get candidates with exposure to new and emerging areas of their businesses," added Sullivan from Hudson. "Therefore they are looking globally to more mature markets for skills that help build new business areas."
This is exactly what Ken Chih, CIO of Orient Overseas Container Line (OOCL) encountered back in 1993, when the company migrated its application infrastructure from mainframe to an object-oriented architecture.
"[Object-oriented programming] was considered a bleeding-edge technology back then, it was impossible for us to find anyone here with the skills and knowledge," he said. "Thus the job was done in San Jose [California], where more technical talent is available."
Although in recent years object-oriented programming has become more acceptable among enterprise, Chih said it is still considered an experimental technology, making it difficult for OOCL to find experienced locals. The same problem occurs in the area of information security, as there are only a few companies in Hong Kong providing information security consultancy and they are all foreign-managed, added Stagg.
Enterprise training
Some employers are addressing this skill shortage through training. "As an executive, I'm not only running an IT shop, but I'm also in a job of training people," said Lee. "More employers realized the existing staff is their biggest asset. Since they understand the business, it's definitely a low-risk/high-return investment to train staff."
When Towngas migrated a legacy system a few years ago, the company hired an outsourcing firm to help give its staff a chance to learn the latest technology.
Lee said training programs often align with new projects and implementations, allowing a more flexible budget for training, as well as more opportunities for staff to apply the newly acquired knowledge in a real scenario.
Training is also an essential part at OOCL's 750-people IT shop, which has staff in five locations: Hong Kong, San Jose, Manila, Shanghai and Zhuhai. Chih said each center has their own expertise, and cross-training among these teams is encouraged.
"We encourage internal training and have sent staff from Hong Kong for technical training in the San Jose center, where the most experienced developers and architects are located," he said.
The company supports training graduates and promoting them internally. Since the company is based in Hong Kong, Chih noted the IT operation here plays a business and strategic role. It not only houses the datacenter and hosts the core operation systems, but also manages major enterprise-wide projects.
"We seldom hire senior-level IT staff, because our staff here has the best understanding of our business domain and users' requirements," he said. "They play a major role in project management, while the other centers take up the actual development job."
However not all employers are willing to provide training, claimed Sullivan from Hudson.
"Most companies only want to hire people with experience, but provide limited training and commitment in employees," she said. "Employers need to be more strategic in deciding how to prepare younger IT candidates."
Stagg agreed limited training is provided from the employers, but also noted they are discouraged by the high turnover rate.
"If you talk with anybody in Hong Kong that has been working in the IT sector for more than 10 years, they don't send their staff in training courses, because as soon as they train them, employees tend to leave and get a new job that pays more," he said. "Then they'll have to recruit and train [new employees] all over again."
Although employers are also responsible to keep their offers aligned with the staff's skills and experience, Stagg said if disloyal employees do not contribute after training, it will discourage other employers from providing further training.
Building soft skills
Apart from the technical skills, deteriorating communication skills is another common complaints among employers.
Lee from Towngas noted that communication skills are essential at two levels: to cooperate with fellow technicians and to understand business users' needs.
Application development in enterprise-scale projects relies on teamwork, so it's important that IT staff understand each other and communicate in a professional way to allow cooperation, noted Chih at OOCL.
"Teamwork is particularly important in an object-oriented architecture," he said. "Thus, when hiring graduates, we emphasize their ability to work as a team."
Another level of communication skills is to understand business users, added Lee. Business analysis skill is critical for understanding business users' requirements, as are presentation skills for explaining technical concerns in laymen terms.
"The understanding of business is useful for working staff to anticipate users' needs," he said. "Since business and users' needs change constantly, if IT supports only users' requirements, we'll always be playing catch-up."
Stagg added that standard communication skills like writing reports, managing spreadsheets, or communicating with clients is lacking among the local IT workforce.
"I've interviewed people that are good with their technical skills, but they can't document reports. I'm spending an awful lot of time editing reports and approving emails before they are sent to clients."
Lee from City University also agreed with these complaints. He said the university realizes most technical program graduates lack knowledge in three major areas: functional business knowledge, like marketing or basic accounting skills, industry knowledge, and communication and organization skills.
While these are core courses in the Faculty of Business, most science and technical programs do not require students to take these classes. To help close this gap in the industry, Lee said universities are introducing more communication and business knowledge courses as electives for IT students.
With education reform scheduled for 2012, tertiary education will be extended from a three-year to a four-year program and universities will be able to introduce multiple-disciplinary schemes, said Lee. With more time available in tertiary education, students are able to take more courses, thus encouraging students to acquire a double major, like engineering and business, to help graduates acquire better skill-sets.
Searching for geeks
Identifying technical and communication skills are essential for employers, but Lee from Towngas noted there is never a perfect match. "Very often, technical skills are not the major criteria, as long as the applicants are willing to learn," he added.
Yet, the enthusiasm and capability to learn new technology is also lacking among the local IT workforce.
"When I'm recruiting, I want to find somebody [who is] interested to find out how things work when given access to the system," said Stagg. "I've found very few people [who] have that interest and those [that do] have it are now working for me."
Older-generation computer science graduates were basically geeks, he said. Students used to play with computers all day at school and tinker more when they got home. Often they were playing on a research level, meaning they were exploring new technologies like building their own Linux boxes or setting up their own web servers. Students were thus versed in various practical skills by graduation.
"But people that I interview today say they only have Window boxes at home and use them only for playing games," he said. "I might have unreasonably high expectations, but I wish the university would encourage undergraduates to go play more on a research level."
Part of the reason that graduates are not enthusiastic about IT is because they are not attracted to developing a career in the industry, Lee from City University explained.
"Since the fall of the dotcom, many students believe there are limited opportunities within IT," he said. "Therefore higher grade students are no longer interested in taking the IT-related programs."
He said pursuing a career in IT is not attractive to students, thus the students that enter IT-related programs tend not to be the high quality ones.
According to figures from the Joint University Programs Admission System (JUPAS), average score for students admitted (in the IT-related programs) are lower by one to two grades as compared to a few years ago.
"We used to get As and Bs students, now most of the admitted students are the Bs and Cs students," added Lee.
Hiring continues
Despite employers' concerns, Chih said every year OOCL still hires about 50-60 percent of its IT staff locally. The company mainly hires staff straight from university and "we have a vigorous recruitment process with a 3-month probation."
"There's no single solution for employers to deal with these problems," said Lee. "At Towngas, we try to hire very carefully."
Assessment of a candidate is based on the four elements: skills, experience, professionalism and attitude, which Lee calls "SEPA." Meanwhile, reference-checking, testing and professional qualifications are often good practices.
For smaller IT operations like Stagg's IT consulting firm: "the one overriding criteria that I'm looking for from the candidate is being able to find things themselves and the ability to realize you have to do it."
He reminded students not to rely on university education for the necessary skills to develop a career within the industry.
"Nothing I learned in university is even relevant now," said the IT employment consultant. "Everything in IT changes so fast, if you can't figure out how to work things out by yourself and how to keep things current, then very quickly you will be unemployable or stuck in the same job forever."