Skills Survey 2007: Banks hardest hit by staff crisis

The IT skills shortage is hitting the financial services industry hardest.

According to results from the exclusive 2007 silicon.com Skills Survey, FS companies are finding it most difficult to fill IT vacancies in their organisations, compared to the public sector and the world of retail.

Half of the respondents to the survey who work in the FS sector said they have tech job vacancies they are unable to fill. This compares to 44 per cent of respondents in the retail sector and just over a third (35 per cent) of those who work in the public sector.

When it comes to specific IT skills shortages, the FS industry and the public sector are finding it hardest to locate staff with programming languages, followed by workers with database skills. In the retail sector programming languages, database and Windows skills are all equally hardest to find.

Skills Survey 2007: the results

Find out from this year's Skills Survey:

♦  Are CIOs getting less cash?
♦ How the staffing crisis is deepening
♦ How techie salaries are faring
♦ Offshoring still a hot potato

The non-IT skill in shortest supply in the FS sector is project management, followed by 'knowledge of the sector' - perhaps owing to the need to comply with heavyweight industry-specific regulations such as MiFID and Basel II.

In the retail and public sectors, project management is the non-IT skill in shortest supply, followed by leadership skills.

But the majority of respondents from all three sectors disagree or strongly disagree there is a need to hire staff from overseas to plug short-term skills gaps. Such shortages can be adequately filled by hiring contractors, according to the majority of respondents from the FS, public and retail sectors. There is also strong support for more in-house IT training across all three sectors - especially the FS and retail sectors, where nearly three-quarters of respondents agree or strongly agree organisations need to devote more time to it.

On the question of IT outsourcing, the retail sector has clearly felt the pinch: nearly three-quarters of respondents from this sector said IT departments have been forced to outsource to cut costs. That compares to less than two-thirds from the FS sector and less than half from the public sector.

All sectors see learning over the web becoming increasingly important - with more than half of respondents from the FS and retail sectors, and close to two-thirds of those from the public sector, agreeing or strongly agreeing e-learning is getting more significant.

Software as a service, however, is not yet viewed as a viable alternative to employing skilled staff in any of the verticals. The majority of respondents said they have not been driven to consider SaaS because of skills shortages in their organisations.

Read more Skills Survey stories:

• Skills Survey 2007: Staffing crisis deepens
• Skills Survey 2007: Big earners trending upwards
• Skills Survey 2007: CIOs getting less cash?
• Skills Survey 2007: Offshoring still a hot potato