Information Age: News, analysis & insight for IT & business leaders

Network equipment vendor Cisco is focusing on allowing its top performers to work on bigger and better projects, says Charlie Johnston, the company’s HR director. “We are seeing a lot more competition in recruitment and a number of our competitors are hiring, so we focus on creating a company where people want to work,” he says.

This entails ongoing professional development, including programmes where IT professionals can spend time on projects outside their normal department. the right candidates from a larger pool of job-seekers is becoming tougher,” he says. One option for companies wanting to avoid the scrum is to make more use of informal recruitment processes, advises Hoffman. “We do a lot of networking. We use LinkedIn fairly widely, and just make contact with people, well before the vacancies arise,” he says. “It’s about plugging into that network of senior, qualified professionals and, through them, their contacts.”

The ideal candidate

Although the recruitment market generally has slowed down, demand has remained stronger at the upper levels of the IT industry, and particularly for professionals with strong commercial skills.

The old cliché that the ideal is an IT professional that ‘understands the business’ still holds true, but employers are increasingly looking for supplier management and finance skills, too. This need is being driven by cost-cutting programmes that have led to an increase in outsourcing and a growing interest in cloud computing services.

“Although there is always demand for strong technical and communication skills, increasingly companies don’t need someone to walk around the data centre,” says Rice. “They need someone to manage perhaps two or three different suppliers who are providing that service, so it needs to be someone with experience of contracts and service level agreements, and integrating those services appropriately.”

This role is what Hrycyk calls the ‘expert client’. “The people I want to recruit are people who can manage three different vendors and third parties and internal resources and cloud services, and use their commercial knowledge and great communication skills to bring that all together to deliver a service, and to help us source new services,” he says. “That skill set is massively underdeveloped in the senior management cadre because people tend to get to that IT manager level through good, hands-on technical skills, and then find this new transformation very hard.”

"The IT function is going to look very different in the next few years."
Thomas Fuller, Deloitte

Today’s IT managers need strong skills in things like planning, capacity management and alignment of service provision with business needs, says Thomas Fuller, a manager in Deloitte’s IT efficiency team. “Outsourcing has required some of this in the past, but cloud brings it to a new level,” he says. “The IT function within the organisation is going to look very different in the next few years.”

Certainly, Hrycyk expects Severn Trent Water’s IT department to be very different ten years from now. “In a decade’s time we will have a small team of highly commercial managers with strong technical expertise delivering a service through a secure cloud to a highly mobilised workforce,” he predicts. “And to do that I’m looking for people who can manage managers, communicate with third parties and deliver reliable, secure, flexible services.”

According to Deloitte’s Fuller, the reason these skills are so highly sought after is that there are no formal processes for developing them within the IT industry. “One of the challenges is that there’s no history of bigger-picture people in IT because we don’t have a good stream of professionals coming out of university or structured development programmes,” he says. “That means those people at a senior level tend to have built their skills based on their IT project experience. There’s no core body of knowledge about how to exploit IT, how to build systems, how to manage a supplier.”

Another consideration in selecting IT leaders is cultural fit. Fuller says that one of the most common reasons that CIOs and senior IT executives move jobs so frequently is that their ‘style’ isn’t a good fit with their employer. “It’s a bit like dating; you do need to shop around to get the right person for your organisation,” he says. “If you want an IT director who is an evangelist who will inspire you to do new things, that’s very different from the person you need if your organisation is more risk- averse and wants IT infrastructure to be stable and reliable.”

The challenge of recruiting skilled, experienced IT staff isn’t about to get any easier in future, says Hoffman. “I think it will be interesting to see whether the cuts in the public sector mean it becomes easier in the short term, but in the next decade, I think recruitment at this level will get much harder,” he says. “There’s a real shortage of students qualifying in IT, computing and engineering-related subjects at GCSE, A-Level and degree level, and we need to address that now, or this problem isn’t going to get any better, regardless of what happens to the economy.”