IT Skills Shortage A Chance for Unemployed Workers
The argument over the so-called IT skills shortage has two familiar sides: On one hand, employers say they can't find the skilled IT workers they need to fill jobs. Even today, in the midst of a worldwide economic recession that has left millions of U.S. workers without jobs, employers claim that they can't find people with the right skills.
On the other side of the debate, legions of qualified IT workers ( CompTIA estimates there are 12 million of them) wonder how such a skills shortage exists when so many of them are looking for a job.
In the middle of this conundrum is Todd Thibodeaux, president and CEO of CompTIA, the Computing Technology Industry Association, which provides training and certification programs for experienced and aspiring IT professionals.
Thibodeaux sees both the job opportunities available in IT and the people looking for them. His mission is to connect all displaced workers -- not just those in IT -- to opportunities in the industry through skills training and certification. He spoke with CIO.com about the job opportunities available in IT, misconceptions about IT careers, and why a computer science degree isn't a prerequisite for an IT job.
CIO: What job opportunities are available in IT?
Todd Thibodeaux: There are about 200,000 to 300,000 good-paying IT jobs available. To this day, if you open any newspaper or browse any job board, not just IT job boards like Dice, IT jobs are in most abundance. We continue to hear from companies, whether they're hospitals, universities or in IT, that they still can't find highly-skilled, quality labor.
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Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
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IT Skill shortage?
Really? There is a shortage of skilled IT workers? I'm not entirely sure that is the case - the demand for people who hold master's degrees in computer science, for example, remains high as few people skip the process of jumping headfirst into the lucrative computer science industry in order to pursue more education.