Communications of the ACM
Will Your Talent Pool Fix You Or Ruin You When Growth Returns?
With the national unemployment rate now above 8% and many companies dealing with frozen or slashed IT budgets, it's a pretty long stretch to imagine a shortage of IT people anytime soon. Yet, it's exactly this shortage of talent that IT leaders should be thinking about now. Once more companies refocus their energy from cost-cutting to new business growth plans, CIOs will be scrutinizing what types of talent they'll need to drive the IT projects that will fuel those new-business initiatives. This is especially true for the emerging pockets of opportunities in areas like healthcare and green IT, where strong market players are already ramping up their hiring.
Concerned about a future talent shortage, some companies are already thinking ahead. While many competitors may be focusing primarily on cost cutting these days, not all are. Sectors such as retail and health care are moving new IT projects up the priority list. Healthcare is a particularly attractive area since tens of thousands of U.S. hospitals and doctors will begin to deploy new electronic-health record systems and other IT-focused applications over the next several years. Tech vendors selling these solutions to the medical sector are ramping up their hiring efforts for the IT talent to train and support these efforts, while hospitals and clinics are also beefing up talent to deploy these projects.
From Information Week
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