There was an interesting story during the week from the latest Morgan McKinley Irish Employment Monitor concerning the difficulties SMEs were experiencing in recruiting staff. According to the report, Irish SMEs were struggling to attract the best potential employees in the face of competition for their interest from large, multinational companies based in Ireland.
The report stated that there were 40% more professional jobs available in Ireland in May 2015 compared to the same month in 2014 but the number of professionals looking for new roles was down 12% for the same period. In part, this was down to the fact that higher rates of employment had resulted in less people looking for jobs.
In a bid to counter the trend, Morgan McKinley Ireland operations director Brian Hyland claimed SMEs were “increasingly focused on hiring outside the EU, despite the additional administrative burden this involves. Challenges competing with multinationals for talent are driving this search”.
Another complication was that many of the new opportunities were “highly skilled, specialist roles that do not require legacy skill sets”, Hyland added. “Companies are having to develop creative recruitment strategies in response” such as recruiting professionals overseas or developing future talent through stronger links with universities and third level institutions.
IT roles
In strictly IT-terms, the report found cybersecurity roles had grown month on month in 2015 “as security concerns are increasingly recognised as posing a global threat to business”.
But here’s the thing: right now, employers are looking at cybersecurity skills but what will they be looking for six months or 12 months into the future? Against that backdrop, how can any business develop future talent if no one can predict what the talent of the future will be? Come to think of it, how can any student confidently choose a course that will equip him or her with a talent that is in demand in three years time?
Common sense would dictate that you can’t. In fact, it’s close to nonsensical to think employers and employees can arrive at the optimal situation where workers with exactly the right skills are coming onto the job market at precisely the right time for employers to fulfil a particular customer demand at a specific moment in time.
The fact is that even if you were able to create an educational system that was so in tune with the evolution of the technology market to achieve that nirvana, it would only apply for a brief period of time before the carnival moved on and employers started complaining about a skills shortage in a newer area. Short of changing degree courses every three to six months, it would be virtually impossible to have the skills available when they’re required.
Greater expectations
This is a issue Peter Cappelli, George W. Taylor professor of management at Wharton University, made in a recent interview with The Atlantic about his forthcoming book Will College Pay Off? .
He pointed out that it’s not that long ago that employers used to look “for smart or adaptable kids on college campuses with general skills. They would convert them to what they wanted inside the company and they would retrain them and they’d get different skills”. But things have changed since then. Employers are “not doing that now. They’re just expecting that the kids will show up with the skills that the employer needs when the employer needs them. That’s a pretty difficult thing to expect”.
Cappelli argues that some jobs, particularly those in technology, are often referred to as ‘hot’ jobs but “the reason that they’re hot is precisely because you can’t predict them. And it’s not like all tech jobs are hot—that’s a myth. It’s not like all engineering jobs are hot—they’re not. The ones that are hot vary every few years, and the reason they’re hot is because something happens to increase demand like a new technology”.
He points out that “in Silicon Valley, the industry was built with only 10% of the workforce having IT degrees. You can do most of these jobs with a variety of different skills”.
The difference today is that “people have come to think that you need these degrees in order to do the jobs, which is not really true. Maybe what these degrees do for you is they shorten the job training by a bit, but that’s about it. And you lose a bunch of other things along the way”.
Responsibility
We live in an age where employers are trying to reduce their own responsibility for training employees by shifting the burden onto their workers and the education system. In many respects, this is a futile exercise. Complaints from employers about skills shortages demonstrate all too clearly that the education system is not a suitable vehicle for delivering pre-packaged future employees to order.
Nothing beats learning on-the-job. We all accept that a footballer can train all he likes, but it doesn’t prepare him completely for his first game. We all agree that the same footballer will usually get better the more games he plays. The difficulty for a large number of companies in IT is that it is very hard for them to meet the expense of training staff themselves, either formally or on-the-job, because so many of them fall into the SME (or even micro business) category. Perhaps, government should concentrate more training support in this area?
The fact is that down through the ages, there have always been skills shortages. The difference is that in the past many employers understood it was part of their role to address the challenge by training their workforce, whether they be school leavers or graduates. Today, companies want someone else to do it for them. But the truth is that, all too often, no one else can.
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