By William Shenton, 28 July 2010 17:06
NEWS
An overwhelming majority of corporate CIOs consider soft skills to be in short supply, according to new research.
A report published this week by Xantus Consulting found that techies need to improve their ability to communicate with the rest of the organisation, with 96 per cent of CIOs saying their IT departments need to boost their relationship management skills.
"Most IT organisations need much stronger skills in their 'front tier', the part of their business that interfaces with the rest of the organisation", the report quotes David Lister, group CIO at National Grid, as saying.
Business relationship management skills, leadership skills and communication skills top the list of capabilities hardest to find in IT departments, according to the report.
"These are what I call the 'think' skills: the ability to understand the impact an incident may have on the business, rather than to view it as a purely technology problem. People with these skills... can paint a clear picture of what we're trying to achieve to non-technical people. They're hard to find and expensive, but I would rather have a small number of people with these skills in my department than twice as many technicians", Mike Bell, group IT director at Kingfisher, told Xantus.
Softer business skills are proving hard to find for IT bosses
(Photo credit: Shutterstock)
Along with in-demand soft skills, some technical competencies are proving hard to find for CIOs too.
IT strategy and architecture skills were deemed hard to find by 69 per cent of those surveyed, while business analysis skills were difficult to locate for 52 per cent of CIOs. Project delivery skills were hard to find for 39 per cent of IT chiefs.
Finding appropriate technical and business skills among new graduates has been a perennial problem for the IT industry.
The challenge of recruiting candidates with suitable skills doesn't appear to be lessening, with 76 per cent of CIOs surveyed reporting difficulties finding the right type of graduates.
Comments
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1. RichardS
Another day, another "me too" report.
Will we every read a report saying that "business leaders" should improve their knowledge of technology; or even of the businesses that they are "leading"?
How about a report saying that HR and recruitment staff should have even a basic grasp of employees' actual duties?
Behind all these "need soft skills" reports is a worrying belief that any real technological competence is of trivial importance and is far too demeaning for the "aristos" who are running businesses... mostly into the ground.
2. benchannell
HR and recruitment staff, searches CV for specific words i.e. technology or IT products and Jargon. Often wishing for a specialist in X, Y and Z. Any one with soft skills or business focused skills is rejected from recruitment processes. But Impact analysis and business cases are part of TOGAF. This is in part caused by IT staff being labelled as Geeks or Nerds, and a department concerned with technology. Thus HR and some business managers complete the rest of the problem as they do not recruit IT staff with soft skills or train existing staff to gain soft skills or define what are there required soft skills, or have I got it wrong ?