"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."