A conversation at Hong KongAirport
When waiting for the airplane in Hong Kong Airport to go to India, I met a friend who also waits for airplane to return to Germany. We decided to have coffee together and our conversation turned into the issue of the information skills shortage.
Rudy, the manager of a German company told me: “Just like the U.S., European countries are not producing IT workers fast enough to keep up with the high demand. The shortage will grow worse over the next few years and slows down our economic improvement efforts. The European Union has increased the efforts to bring in more skilled technology workers from Asia to fill the shortage and at the same time, providing more money to technology training programs in our schools. Currently, there are about 80,000 opening jobs without applicants and this could grow to a million in the next five years. That is why I am here to recruit IT workers for my company in Germany. There is high demand in Germany and the U.K for IT workers, the U.K solve this problem by bringing more Indian workers as they all speak English. For Germany, it is more difficult to find workers who can speak German.”
I told him: “The United States is having the same problem. Today technologies change faster than workers can learn the skills so the gap between demand and supply is a big problem. In order to have IT workers, many companies are raising the salaries to steal workers from others and this encourages more people to switch job, which is another problem. The shortage also provides opportunities for people with degree but not skills to get jobs and it creates a lot of problem in the industry.”
Rudy asked: “Have you read Mr. Laszo Bock's book about the hiring of workers in technology industry?”
I told him: “Yes, I did. As senior vice president of Google, Mr. Bock knows the problems in technology industry well. According to him, the hiring of IT workers based on degree and grade point average is worthless. There are many graduates with good grades in school but cannot apply anything in their job. He advocated more testing in the hiring of college graduates because many schools are also doing a bad job in training students. I remember in one of the chapter he wrote that "Most job interviews are a waste of time because managers ask dubious questions like "Tell me about yourself"; "What is your weakness?"; "What is your strength?" Instead of asking these nonsense questions, managers should focus on questions that pertain to the actual work to be done. Today Google does not ask questions but give candidates some sample of works, similar to what they would do in the real job, and assessing their performance. Basically it is a test for their skills at work.”
Rudy asked: “So does that means the company no longer hiring based on college degree?”
I explained: “The jobs require a college degree, but having degree is not enough. Candidates must prove that they have the skills to do the job also. And even this cannot predict how well the candidate will perform because most jobs also require teamwork and collaboration with others. Today Google has developed a tool called qDroid, which is a set of prepared test questions for the various job roles a hiring manager must ask. Many of the questions are problems that a candidate must solve. Only candidates who can solve these problems will get hired and that is why the company is doing well because they are very selective. I think the success of Google is due to the way it attract talented workers that want to work for a fast growing company.”
Rudy agreed: “In global business, successful by being profitable is not enough. The mark of global success is company must continue to innovate and bringing new technology into the market. To do that the company needs skilled workers who can help the constantly growing and changing with the flow of the market. It seems Google is doing well because it has visionary leaders who can lead the company moving forward and talented workers who can implement the vision. The problem today is there are not many technology leaders who can do that. Technical people prefer to do technical works, business people tend to focus on business and there is nothing in between. To find someone with strong technical skills but also understand business is very difficult.”
I explained: “It is the flaw of traditional education system that dividing students into categories but today the new education trend is about inter-disciplinary fields that involves the combining of two or more academic fields into one new field as new needs and professions emerge. For example, the Information System Management is the combination of computer science and business administration. Graduates in this field are responsible for managing the computer systems within a company where they oversee installation of hardware and software to make sure the systems operate effectively. They also contribute to the company policy on security and quality standards and technology strategic planning. These managers manage a group of technicians, software developers and database administrators. Another example is the Data Analyst, which is the combination of software engineering, math and statistics. Graduates in this field are responsible for collecting, cleaning, transforming, validating and modeling data with the goal of understanding the trends and transform them into information for decision making purposes.”
Rudy agreed: “Both of these fields have the highest demand in the industry today. It is easy to find IT workers who can program, build websites, develop applications but I cannot find many schools that teach these two fields. Probably because inter-disciplinary fields are new, not many students are studying them so the need is high. As I travel in Asia to find IT workers, I find that the number of students selecting technology fields has increased. This is good news for many western companies who have difficulty filling their IT jobs but the trainings are still not as we expected.”
I asked: “So what are you looking for and how do you hiring them?”
Rudy explained: “We are looking for all types of IT workers. From software developers who have strong Java programming skills to develop software products from the early stages through the end of the development process, establishing requirements for new products, designing prototypes, and reviewing code. We also hire Web developers who can design and build websites, and responsible for maintaining and improving the front-end and back-end of websites. We also looking for Database administrators, who define, collect, implement and manage database. But what we really need are IT workers who have skills in mobility, security, virtualization, cloud computing, big data and the Internet of Everything (IoE). However, with the shortage we cannot be choosy. In the past we are looking in countries that were close to us such as Poland, Austria, Hungary and Czech Republic but we learned that by limits to candidates from these areas we will have difficult to fill high-demand positions so we are now seeking people from all over the world. We allow some employees to stay and work in their own country too. Of course, some jobs are not possible to working from remote location away from the company but others can, as long as they have high-speed, secure Internet connection and basic collaboration tools. Currently some software testing jobs are done in China and India and we will expand it to other places too.”
I asked: “Have you hire enough people to meet your need?
Rudy shook his head: “No, competition is tough. We are not the only company hiring in China and India. There are hundred others also looking for IT skilled workers. For some hard-to-fill positions, we have to identify current employees who, with some training, can quickly learn additional skills needed in our company. Most IT workers rate training as an important factor in their professional development so we begin to provide additional trainings if they are likely to stay and develop their career advancement in our company. Because technology changes fast, there is a new trend about training now.
He smiled: “Instead of asking, "What if I train someone and they leave?" the question we are asking is, "What if I don't train them and they stay?"
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
