DCU IT jobs survey shows 17,400 vacancies
Tuesday 5 June 2007

DCU students demonstrating final year projects

DCU final year students from the BSc in Computer Applications held successful open demonstrations to IT professionals and potential employers displaying their final year project work.

The solutions developed by students cover a wide spectrum of application areas. These include artificial intelligence, embedded systems, information management, digital signal processing, e-commerce, educational applications, gaming, graphics, Internet, mobile and wireless applications, multimedia, natural language processing, network applications and security. This event has been running for the last number of years and has had a fantastic response from both the students and the IT industry.

In the latest DCU IT jobs survey for Summer 2007, carried out by Prof Michael Ryan, it was found that there are now an estimated 17,400 job vacancies here, a growth of over 100% in two years.

Prof Michael Ryan says: “Clearly companies are having difficulties in finding I.T. staff. This year’s display of final year projects by BSc in Computer Applications students at DCU attracted a record number of potential employers, many of whom spoke of recruitment problems.”

In the USA the situation is similar. According to CNN, analysis of job advertisements shows that two of the five ‘hottest jobs’ in the USA involve computing. Computer Programmer comes in the top spot, ahead of Healthcare (doctors, dentists, nurses and other health practitioners), Finance (accountants and financial analysts), Operations Managers, and hardware Computer Engineers (http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/biz2/0704/gallery.jobs_hottest.biz2/index.html). This supports the CNN study done in 2006, which found that software development was the best job in the USA, taking into account opportunities, salary, and working conditions.

Unlike the USA, Accounting/Finance job advertisements in Ireland on the WWW outnumber those in IT by about 25%. But with far fewer IT graduates and a smaller pool of existing practitioners, job opportunities per person in IT are higher, and on that basis the IT sector here still comes out ahead.

These job opportunities have grown rapidly over the past two years, with more than twice the number of IT job advertisements and vacancies now compared to May 2005.

The growth of over 100% in the number of job advertisements and estimated job vacancies in just two years is striking. It suggests that the future I.T. skills gap in the economy is likely to be wider than predicted by the reports of the Expert Group on Future Skills Needs and other bodies.

As long as it is possible to fill this gap by immigration, as is happening now, the severity of its impact will be reduced. Shortages elsewhere in Europe, as indicated by the reports of the Council of European Informatics Society (CEPIS), and competition from the USA, suggest however that this will be increasingly difficult.

According to Professor Michael Ryan “in the longer term we need to grow our own supply of experts in the core IT areas on which we will depend. The shortages indicated by the survey are going to become very serious unless we succeed in interesting both young and old in Information Technology. We need to get across a more accurate picture of the career opportunities and broad educational benefits of an IT qualification. Unfortunately the echoes of the dot.com collapse still dominate most people’s attitudes, and with computing effectively missing from the second level syllabus, and no real understanding of professional careers in IT it is hardly surprising that so few choose to study it. So far, the results of our attempts to remedy this have fallen well short of what is needed. It is a difficult and serious problem, which is not going to be easy to solve.”