So what happened to those IT workers who lost jobs in the first few years of the new millennium? Many of them left the IT market and never came back, says Dan Reynolds, CEO of The Brokers Group LLC, a Princeton, N.J.-based regional staffing service that caters to pharmaceutical, health care, financial services and media companies from Manhattan to Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley. Computerworld's Thomas Hoffman spoke to Reynolds today about those vanished IT workers and other current market trends.
How would you characterize the current IT labor market? Is there strong demand for certain types of skills? We're seeing a lot of that; there's strong demand in certain vertical industries. There's more money in the economy and our business almost tracks the economy like a mirror. We're seeing strong demand for people with solid project management skills. We're also seeing strong demand for sophisticated Java, specifically J2EE folks. People with Microsoft .Net skills are extremely popular right now. Within these skill sets, clients are also looking for people with vertical-industry expertise, like pharmaceutical or biotech experience.
From a database and data storage standpoint, we're also seeing strong demand for Oracle database administrators and a need for UNIX systems administrators. We're also seeing a lot on the data warehousing/business intelligence side. Clients are asking 'How do we analyze the data, how do we make the data work in a more efficient manner?'
Is increased demand driving higher wages? What we saw last year was a leveling of wages. Last year was the first time our clients weren't pushing back on wages. In 2006, we're seeing an increase in wages. Quality talent is scarcer, so people are recognizing they need to be more flexible around compensation.
We're also seeing [IT] teams a little bit better staffed than they were in the past. With people working 12 to 15 hours a day every day, and short staffed, it's unsustainable. Companies are having to add people.
For IT workers who lost their jobs between 2001 and 2005, have you seen a lot of them re-enter the market? Highly-skilled people, people who brought value to the client, stayed employed. They might've stayed employed with a slight rate reduction, but not by much. Those people who weren't as highly skilled might have run into problems. If you were doing Cobol, CICS or DB2 (programming), you found yourself in a world of hurt for a while. I don't really see them coming back into the workforce that much. We're not seeing a lot of people coming back from that.
Studies have indicated that people who are victims of layoffs often move on to less challenging positions afterwards, perhaps as a result of seeking greater job security. How have you seen this play out with technicians and IT managers that your organization has helped place? We do mostly contract staffing. Let's take a project manager who might've been laid off due to geographic circumstances or was in an industry that wasn't performing well during the economic downturn. We're finding that they want to become permanent employees. Maybe that's because there's more risk aversion.
So are employers leaning more towards hiring contract workers or FTEs? We're seeing [employers] trying to have their cake and eat it too. Most clients would like to bring workers on as contract labor with the option of picking them up as a permanent employee. It's almost like doing a working interview, bringing someone on for six months and then determining whether to bring them on full time. We're seeing a lot of that.