According to the IT Employee Confidence Index, a survey conducted by Harris Interactive and commissioned by IT staffing company Technisource, IT workers are more confident in the economy than they have been in the past three years, and 37% are planning to look for new jobs in the next 12 months.
In January, the AP reported on a BLS statistics showing that only about 45% of US workers were happy with their jobs. In May, The Wall Street Journal reported on BLS data indicating more workers in general were quitting their jobs.
“During the recession many companies had to initiate hiring freezes, postpone new technology implementations and simply ‘do more with less,'” Technisource president Michael Winwood said in a press release. IT workers, like many other workers, could be harboring resentment for their current employers and/or be suffering from burnout.
Enterprise IT departments should be particularly concerned about turnover. Although overall job growth in the US is stagnant, IT spending is projected rise, so IT workers confidence may not be misplaced.
Before the recession, enterprises faced staffing shortages in IT and if demand for IT workers picks up, it will be workers who have the upper hand. Much was written before the recession speculating as to the reasons for the shortage of skilled IT workers. Blogger Dan Morrill wrote about the poor quality and high cost of education in the US, and the precarity of IT careers (this rant drives the precarity point home).
But Linda Musthaler, writing for Network World, pointed to the numbers of unemployed but highly skilled IT workers looking for employment even before the recession:
There’s no shortage of smart, employable IT workers. There is a shortage of flexible employers who are willing to hire people who don’t match an exact, niche profile or have a very specific skill or type of experience. There is a shortage of companies willing to invest in the training and development of enthusiastic and committed employees.
If workers can’t find the training they need outside the work place, and enterprises can’t find the employees that meet their criteria, there’s a clear compromise: better internal training programs. Enterprises will need to invest more in employees to retain a competitive edge in the future.
