AN executive of a German software company warned there will be intense competition among various sectors to get the best possible manpower in the information-technology (IT) sector.
“I believe you will see a global war for IT talent. We are really in the beginning of a significant shift in terms of jobs and the need for educated people to fill the possible void,” Markus Meissner of AEB Gesellschaft zur Entwicklung von Branchen-Software mbH told the BusinessMirror. “We can really feel it.”
Meissner, managing director of Stuttgart, Germany-based software developer and consulting company, cited Europe as an example where the fierce recruitment of skilled IT personnel is happening. He said in a recent one-on-one interview with in Mandaluyong City that the automotive industry is leading the pack in poaching skilled software engineers from other industries.
Albeit the automotive industry is loaded with competent hardware engineers, Meissner said the shift of manufacturers to develop smart cars provides the impetus to the hiring of more software engineers.
“The current trend is now cars are being developed by software-driven technologies,” Meissner said. “They are hiring thousands of IT engineers now.”
According to Meissner, these engineers are being pulled out of the traditional IT companies.
“This is just one of the examples that we see will be the trend in the future. In five years, more automated vehicles will be on the road,” he added. “Pressure for further development will be more significant in various industries.”
Meissner said the online retail market is another industry that will require a huge number of talented information and communications technology (ICT) personnel. To address the imminent dearth of IT manpower, Meissner said there is going to be a need to develop software that may be one the show stoppers of the future.
He also expressed concern that migration of talent will also be a major concern for many countries. With cheaper air fares and the young people’s penchant to get new experience outside their homeland, Meissner said it is possible that the IT talent will be included in this emigration to other countries.
“In Germany the German youth go to Asia because it offers them greater flexibility in their work,” he said. In her article “How to win the war for IT talent,” Sharon Florentine said the global war for IT talent is only going to build up starting this year. Florentine added that even IT titans are facing a huge challenge to recruit and screen a substantial number engineering talent to meet the demand for these skills. Florentine noted some IT companies are using out-of-the-box approaches to fix the problem,
She said one of the steps is to focus on skills.
“Finding IT talent with the right skills and the experience is one of the major problems IT companies face, not because there’s a deficit of skilled programmers but because companies are using archaic methods to source and screen talent,” said David Park, vice president of products and growth at HackerRank, .
“The traditional ways companies are looking for talent isn’t good at finding who’s going to be a good fit,” Park said. “Résumés, cover letters, even interviews are bad for the company and they’re bad for developers because they aren’t focusing on what skills someone has.”
Vivek Ravisanker, cofounder and CEO of HackerRank, a skills-focused technical recruiting platform, said, using “hackathons” is a good move, but will mainly benefit huge companies.
“Some companies are trying to identify talent using hackathons, but it’s a method that excludes companies not large enough to fund extensive travel and also developers who don’t have the time, energy or money to participate—often for days at a time—in these competitions,” Ravisanker said.
Meissner said all sectors need to address the challenge of the shortage of ICT talent. As far as AEB is concerned, Meissner said it has formed partnership with many companies to address the shortage.
“This is a social responsibility for the society,” he said. “We need to support the education process, take the people into the project, train them and give them the freedom to learn the stuff.”