IT Job market
Yesterday, I received an email where the sender wrote: “It is nice to hear that the job market for information technology (IT) is improving and there are many jobs in the U.S and somewhere else. However, in my country, nothing change. The job market is still tough, many IT students are still having difficulty finding jobs. What should we do to improve our job market? Any advices?”
Answer: There are two factors that can improve the IT job market. If your country’s economy is growing strong then local companies would need to hire more IT workers, assume they all have the needed skills. That is the internal factor or growing jobs from the inside. The other or external factor means bringing jobs in from the outside.
With globalization, what happen in the job market of one country will eventually impact other. Today, there is a critical shortage of skilled IT workers in both the U.S and Europe. Where do you think these countries will have to find skilled workers to meet their needs? Some will have to open offices in countries that have skilled workers, other will outsource IT works to another countries, or hire foreign workers and bring them to their countries. Regardless of their choices, no company would just randomly select any country to hire workers but conduct investigation to find out which country would be best for them. Today, India, China and Russia are the three major destinations but all three have also run out of skilled workers. The search for other destinations already begun since the global economic recovery. The key to external factor for job market improvement is knowing what they are looking for and prepare for it.
The first thing the client country (Country that need skilled workers) want to know is how good the education system of the provider country (Country that has skilled workers). They need data on the education system such as what kind of international education standards that the provider country follows; what method of training that provider country uses; What are the number of specific courses within an IT training program (Curricula) and whether it has any relationship with other schools in the client country for comparison and references. They also need information about university research and development, qualification of faculty, data on the number of student enroll in IT and the number of IT graduates each year. A country with good education system but only graduated limited number of IT students may not be best due to the selection process. (On the average, it takes ten to twenty candidates to hire one qualified skilled workers).
The second thing that the client country wants to know is the cost of doing business as compare with their country. Is it lower? Equal, or higher? The cost of doing business is NOT just the labor cost (Wages) but also infrastructure costs (Phones, internets, facilities etc.), and average costs of living. They need data on taxes (Import/export, business and income taxes) and government laws such as the protection of intellectual property, copyrights, and other regulations.
The third thing that the client country wants to know is the skills of the IT workers. The skills are not just technical but also soft skills and language skills (i.e. English, German, Japanese etc.) and the number of available workers (How many are available to work today and the next few years). Following is a sample questions that many global companies are using during their investigation to check (Yes or No):
- The education system has adequately prepared students for job in the industry.
- The education system provided students with knowledge and skills that can contribute to job performance.
- The education system has continuously improving over time.
- The students have good technical skills
- The students have good communication skills, especially language skills.
- The students have good organizational skills and soft skills.
- The students received trainings highly relevant to the best practices in the industry.
- The school has good reputation for many years (Not a recent opening).
- The school follows international education standards.
The fourth thing that they want to know is the political system and the economic environment (i.e., stable or not stable) as well as the legal systems (i.e., good, fair or weak) and how much government support in case for them to recruit or open business in the country (i.e., strong, medium or weak) etc. I am sure there are more since each company may have specific needs.
As the shortage of skilled IT workers continues to increase and global companies are looking for workers everywhere. My first question is: “Does your country meets those requirements and have what global companies are looking for?” If the answer is “Yes” then my second questions are: “Do global companies know about your country’s capabilities? Where do they find information about it? Does your country has “marketing campaign”, or “advertising” about your capabilities? If the answer is “Yes” then it is just a matter of time, your IT job market will improve.
Since you are an IT student, my question is: “What are you going to do since you know what global companies are looking for? Do you have the skills that qualify you for the jobs? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? What are you going to do to improve your chance of getting hired? “What suggestions would you give to other students who want to build a career in Information technology?
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
